“My daughter is overtired, and that’s the truth of it,” explained Maloney presently when he rejoined us and had examined in turn the other paw-marks. “She’s been overdoing it lately, and camp life, you know, always means a great excitement to her. It’s natural enough, if we take no notice she’ll be all right.” He paused to borrow my tobacco pouch and fill his pipe, and the blundering way he filled it and spilled the precious weed on the ground visibly belied the calm of his easy language. “You might take her out for a bit of fishing, Hubbard, like a good chap; she’s hardly up to the long day in the cutter. Show her some of the other islands in your canoe, perhaps. Eh?”

And by lunchtime the cloud had passed away as suddenly, and as suspiciously, as it had come.

But in the canoe, on our way home, having till then purposely ignored the subject uppermost in our minds, she suddenly spoke to me in a way that again touched the note of sinister alarm⁠—the note that kept on sounding and sounding until finally John Silence came with his great vibrating presence and relieved it; yes, and even after he came, too, for a while.