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 some sort of message from your father, too, do you think?"

"No, I think Bagley's business at the Rock was simply a part of a plan of waiting for some one which has been going on for a good many years—and which father had nothing to do with when he was living, surely, and which I can't believe he has anything to do with now."

She saw Barney catch his breath quickly and she knew of what he was thinking. Had the vigil upon the Rock of which she had told him, and which went back to the years before the building of the house when Halford and his uncommunicative alternate kept watch in the old cabin on Resurrection Isle, been a plan of waiting for the boy who called himself Barney Loutrelle?

"Your ring," Ethel recalled to herself suddenly. "And the device carved on the mantel in that room." She did not need to mention what room; he was thinking of it, too.

"Yes?" he said, raising his head.

"They seemed very alike to me, I told you," Ethel said, "the devices on each."

"Yes."

"Wasn't it—like?"

"Yes, Miss Carew."

"Not more than like?"

"They were identical, Miss Carew," he said with a sudden emphasis which betrayed to her something of what he had pent up within. His hand went to his pocket where he kept his ring, and he took out the little chamois bag, in which he preserved it, and held the small band of old, scrolled gold upon his palm. The pattern of the working followed no easily described