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 in a foolish, folksy—hot lemonade!—Lord!" And he shook his shoulders almost angrily and threw himself down again on the hearth-rug.

The darkening room was warm as an oven now, and the great, soft, glowing pile of apple-wood embers lured one's drowsy eyes like a flame-colored pillow. No one spoke at all until midnight.

But the clock had only just finished complaining about the hour when the Partridge Hunter straightened up abruptly and cried out to no one in particular:

"Well, I simply can't bluff this out any longer. I've just got to know how it all happened!"

No one stopped to question his meaning. No one stopped to parry with word or phrase. Like two tense music-boxes wound to their utmost resonance, but with mechanism only just that in stant released, Alrik and the Pretty Lady burst into sound.

The Pretty Lady spoke first. Her breath was short and raspy and cross, like the breath of a person who runs for a train—and misses it.

"It was—in—Florida," she gasped, "the—last—of March. The sailboat was a dreadful, flimsy, shattered thing. But he would go out in it—alone—storm or no storm!" She spoke with a sudden sense of emotional importance, with a certain strange, fierce, new pride in the