What had he done?  
Ignorant why his simple question should have had such strange results, that piercing look made Adrian feel the veriest culprit, and he hastened to leave the room and the cabin. Hurrying to the beach he appropriated Margot’s little canvas canoe and pushed out upon the lake. From her and Pierre he had learned to handle the light craft with considerable skill and he now worked off his excitement by swift paddling, so that there was soon a wide distance between him and the island.
 
Then he paused and looked around him, upon as fair a scene as could be found in any land. Unbroken forests bounded this hidden Lake Profundis, out of whose waters [Pg 97]rose that mountain-crowned, verdure-clad Island of Peace, with its home, and its cultured owner, who had brought into this best of the the best of civilization.
 
“What is this mystery? How am I concerned in it? For I am, and mystery there is. It is like that mist over the island, which I can see and feel but cannot touch. Pshaw! I’m getting , when I ought to be turning detective. Yet I couldn’t do that—pry into the private affairs of a man who’s treated me so generously. What shall I do? How can I go back there? But where else can I go?”
 
At thought that he might never return to the roof he had quitted, a curious homesickness seized him.
 
“Who’ll hunt what game they need? Who’ll catch their fish? Who’ll keep the garden growing? Where can I study the forest and its people, at first hand, as in the Hollow? And I was doing well. Not as I hope to do, but getting on. Margot was a [Pg 98]merciless critic, but even she admitted that my last picture had the look, the spirit of the woods. That’s what I want to do, what Mr. Dutton, also, approved; to bring glimpses of these back to the cities and the thousands who can never see them in any other way. Well—let it go. I can’t stay and be a to anybody, and some time, in some other place, maybe—— Ah!”
 
What he had mistaken for the laughter of a was Pierre’s halloo. He was coming back, then, from the mainland where he had been absent these past days. Adrian was thankful. There was nothing mysterious or perplexing about Pierre, whose rule of life was extremely simple.
 
“Pierre first, second, and forever. After Pierre, if there was anything l............