He passed out. As the consul glanced from the window he observed,
however, that Mr. Gray was "toddling" in quite another direction than
the wharf. For an instant he half regretted that he had not suggested,
in some discreet way, the conclusion he had arrived at after witnessing
the girl's parting with the middle-aged passenger the day before. But he
reflected that this was something he had only accidentally overseen, and
was the girl's own secret.


II.


When the summer had so waxed in its fullness that the smoke of factory
chimneys drifted high, permitting glimpses of fairly blue sky; when the
grass in St. Kentigern's proudest park took on a less sober green in the
comfortable sun, and even in the thickest shade there was no chilliness,
the good St. Kentigerners recognized that the season had arrived to go
"down the river," and that it was time for them to betake themselves,
with rugs, mackintoshes, and umbrellas, to the breezy lochs and misty
hillsides for which the neighborhood of St. Kentigern is justly famous.
So when it came to pass that the blinds were down in the highest places,
and the most exclusive pavements of St. Kentigern were echoless and
desolate, the consul heroically tore himself from the weak delight of
basking in the sunshine, and followed the others.

He soon found himself settled at the furthest end of a long narrow loch,
made longer and narrower by the steep hillside of rock and heather which
flanked its chilly surface on either side, and whose inequalities were
lost in the firs and larches that filled ravine and chasm. The fragrant