Wanhope tried to offer the only reparation in his power. "I can conjecture--we can all conjecture--"

He hesitated; then, "Well, go on with your conjecture," Rulledge said forgivingly.

"Why--" Wanhope began again; but at that moment a man who had been elected the year before, and then gone off on a long absence, put his head in between the dull-red hangings of the doorway. It was Halson, whom I did not know very well, but liked better than I knew. His eyes were dancing with what seemed the inextinguishable gayety of his temperament, rather than any present occasion, and his smile carried his little mustache well away from his handsome teeth. "Private?"

"Come in, come in!" Minver called to him. "Thought you were in j.a.pan?"

"My dear fellow," Halson answered, "you must brush up your contemporary history. It's more than a fortnight since I was in j.a.pan." He shook hands with me, and I introduced him to Rulledge and Wanhope. He said at once: "Well, what is it? Question of Braybridge's engagement? It's humiliating to a man to come back from the antipodes, and find the nation absorbed in a parochial problem like that. Everybody I've met here to-night has asked me, the first thing, if I'd heard of it, and if I knew how it could have happened."

"And do you?" Rulledge asked.

"I can give a pretty good guess," Halson said, running his merry eyes over our faces.

"Anybody can give a good guess," Rulledge said. "Wanhope is doing it now."

"Don't let me interrupt." Halson turned to him politely.

"Not at all. I'd rather hear your guess. If you know Braybridge better than I," Wanhope said.

"Well," Halson compromised, "perhaps I've known him longer." He asked, with an effect of coming to business, "Where were you?"

"Tell him, Rulledge," Minver ordered, and Rulledge apparently asked nothing better. He told him in detail, all we knew from any source, down to the moment of Wanhope's arrested conjecture.

"He did leave you at an anxious point, didn't he?" Halson smiled to the rest of us at Rulledge's expense, and then said: "Well, I think I can help you out a little. Any of you know the lady?"

"By sight, Minver does," Rulledge answered for us. "Wants to paint her."

"Of course," Halson said, with intelligence. "But I doubt if he'd find her as paintable as she looks, at first. She's beautiful, but her charm is spiritual."

"Sometimes we try for that," the painter interposed.

"And sometimes you get it. But you'll allow it's difficult. That's all I meant. I've known her--let me see--for twelve years, at least; ever since I first went West. She was about eleven then, and her father was bringing her up on the ranche. Her aunt came along, by and by, and took her to Europe; mother dead before Hazelwood went out there. But the girl was always homesick for the ranche; she pined for it; and after they had kept her in Germany three or four years they let her come back, and run wild again; wild as a flower does, or a vine--not a domesticated animal."

"Go slow, Halson. This is getting too much for the romantic Rulledge."

"Rulledge can bear up against the facts, I guess, Minver," Halson said, almost austerely. "Her father died two years ago, and then she _had_ to come East, for her aunt simply _wouldn't_ live on the ranche. She brought her on, here, and brought her out; I was at the coming-out tea; but the girl didn't take to the New York thing at all; I could see it from the start; she wanted to get away from it with me, and talk about the ranche."

"She felt that she was with the only genuine person among those conventional people."

Halson laughed at Minver's thrust, and went on amiably: "I don't suppose that till she met Braybridge she was ever quite at her ease with any man or woman, for that matter. I imagine, as you've done, that it was his fear of her that gave her courage. She met him on equal terms. Isn't that it?"

Wanhope a.s.sented to the question referred to him with a nod.

"And when they got lost from the rest of the party at that picnic--"

"Lost?" Rulledge demanded.

"Why, yes. Didn't you know? But I ought to go back. They said there never was anything prettier than the way she unconsciously went for Braybridge, the whole day. She wanted him, and she was a child who wanted things frankly, when she did want them. Then his being ten or fifteen years older than she was, and so large and simple, made it natural for a shy girl like her to a.s.sort herself with him when all the rest were a.s.sorting themselves, as people do at such things. The consensus of testimony is that she did it with the most transparent unconsciousness, and--"

"Who are your authorities?" Minver asked; Rulledge threw himself back on the divan, and beat the cushions with impatience.

"Is it essential to give them?"

"Oh, no. I merely wondered. Go on."

"The authorities are all right. She had disappeared with him before the others noticed. It was a thing that happened; there was no design in it; that would have been out of character. They had got to the end of the wood-road, and into the thick of the trees where there wasn't even a trail, and they walked round looking for a way out, till they were turned completely. They decided that the only way was to keep walking, and by and by they heard the sound of chopping. It was some Canucks clearing a piece of the woods, and when she spoke to them in French, they gave them full directions, and Braybridge soon found the path again."

Halson paused, and I said, "But that isn't all?"

"Oh, no." He continued thoughtfully silent for a little while before he resumed. "The amazing thing is that they got lost again, and that when they tried going back to the Canucks, they couldn't find the way."

"Why didn't they follow the sound of the chopping?" I asked.

"The Canucks had stopped, for the time being. Besides, Braybridge was rather ashamed, and he thought if they went straight on they would be sure to come out somewhere. But that was where he made a mistake. They couldn't go on straight; they went round and round, and came on their own footsteps--or hers, which he recognized from the narrow tread and the dint of the little heels in the damp places."

Wanhope roused himself with a kindling eye. "That is very interesting, the movement in a circle of people who have lost their way. It has often been observed, but I don't know that it has ever been explained.

Sometimes the circle is smaller, sometimes it is larger; but I believe it is always a circle."

"Isn't it," I queried, "like any other error in life? We go round and round; and commit the old sins over again."

"That is very interesting," Wanhope allowed.

"But do lost people really always walk in a vicious circle?" Minver asked.

Rulledge would not let Wanhope answer. "Go on, Halson," he said.

Halson roused himself from the reverie in which he was sitting with glazed eyes. "Well, what made it a little more anxious was that he had heard of bears on that mountain, and the green afternoon light among the trees was perceptibly paling. He suggested shouting, but she wouldn't let him; she said it would be ridiculous, if the others heard them, and useless if they didn't. So they tramped on till--till the accident happened."

"The accident!" Rulledge exclaimed in the voice of our joint emotion.

"He stepped on a loose stone and turned his foot," Halson explained. "It wasn't a sprain, luckily, but it hurt enough. He turned so white that she noticed it, and asked him what was the matter. Of course that shut his mouth the closer, but it morally doubled his motive, and he kept himself from crying out till the sudden pain of the wrench was over. He said merely that he thought he had heard something, and he had--an awful ringing in his ears; but he didn't mean that, and he started on again.

The worst was trying to walk without limping, and to talk cheerfully and encouragingly, with that agony tearing at him. But he managed somehow, and he was congratulating himself on his success, when he tumbled down in a dead faint."

"Oh, come, now!" Minver protested.

"It _is_ like an old-fashioned story, where things are operated by accident instead of motive, isn't it?" Halson smiled with radiant recognition.

"Fact will always imitate fiction, if you give her time enough," I said.

"Had they got back to the other picnickers?" Rulledge asked with a tense voice.

"In sound, but not in sight of them. She wasn't going to bring him into camp in that state; besides she couldn't. She got some water out of the trout-brook they'd been fishing--more water than trout in it--and sprinkled his face, and he came to, and got on his legs, just in time to pull on to the others, who were organizing a search-party to go after them. From that point on, she dropped Braybridge like a hot coal, and as there was nothing of the flirt in her, she simply kept with the women, the older girls, and the tabbies, and left Braybridge to worry along with the secret of his turned ankle. He doesn't know how he ever got home alive; but he did somehow manage to reach the wagons that had brought them to the edge of the woods, and then he was all right till they got to the house. But still she said nothing about his accident, and he couldn't; and he pleaded an early start for town the next morning, and got off to bed, as soon as he could."

"I shouldn't have thought he could have stirred in the morning,"

Rulledge employed Halson's pause to say.

"Well, this beaver _had_ to," Halson said. "He was not the only early riser. He found Miss Hazelwood at the station before him."

"What!" Rulledge shouted. I confess the fact rather roused me, too; and Wanhope's eyes kindled with a scientific pleasure.