“Good-night, David.”

“Good-night, Father.”

For a space after that he sat staring blankly at the log of his room.  Then he leaned over again and held the photograph a second time in the lampglow.  The first strange spell of the picture was broken, and he looked at it more coolly, more critically, a little disgusted with himself for having allowed his imagination to play a trick on him.  He turned it over in his hands, and on the back of the cardboard mount he saw there had been writing.  He examined it closely, and made out faintly the words, “Firepan Creek, Stikine River, August....” and the date was gone.  That was all.  There was no name, no word that might give him a clue as to the identity of the mysterious woman in the coach, or her relationship to the strange picture she had left in her seat when she disappeared at Graham.

Once more his puzzled eyes tried to find some solution to the mystery of this night in the picture of the girl herself, and as he looked, question after question pounded through his head.  What had startled her?  Who had frightened her?  What had brought that hunted look—­that half-defiance—­into her poise and eyes, just as he had seen the strange questing and suppressed fear in the eyes and face of the woman in the coach?  He made no effort to answer, but accepted the visual facts as they came to him.  She was young, the girl in the picture; almost a child as he regarded childhood.  Perhaps seventeen, or a month or two older; he was curiously precise in adding that month or two.  Something in the woman of her as she stood on the rock made it occur to him as necessary.  He saw, now, that she had been wading in the pool, for she had dropped a stocking on the white sand, and near it lay an object that was a shoe or a moccasin, he could not make out which.  It was while she had been wading—­alone—­that the interruption had come; she had turned; she had sprung to the flat rock, her hands a little clenched, her eyes flashing, her breast panting under the smother of her hair; and it was in this moment, as she stood ready to fight—­or fly—­that the camera had caught her.

Now, as he scanned this picture, as it lived before his eyes, a faint smile played over his lips, a smile in which there was a little humour and much irony.  He had been a fool that day, twice a fool, perhaps three times a fool.  Nothing but folly, a diseased conception of things, could have made him see tragedy in the face of the woman in the coach, or have induced him to follow her.  Sleeplessness—­a mental exhaustion to which his body had not responded in two days and two nights—­had dulled his senses and his reason.  He felt an unpleasant desire to laugh at himself.  Tragedy!  A woman in distress!  He shrugged his shoulders, and his teeth gleamed in a cold smile at the girl in the picture.  Surely there was no tragedy or mystery in her poise on that rock!  She had been bathing, alone, hidden away as she thought; some one had crept up, had disturbed