The furnishings were simple and attractive, with no “Mission” pieces or attempts at camping effects.
I sat down on a wide davenport beside Lora, and said, tentatively:
“I believe you and I agree in our estimate of the Dallas beauty.”
“Then you have real good sense,” exclaimed Lora, heartily. “Kee won’t see her as I do.”
“I won’t either,” put in Maud Merrill. “It’s disgraceful to knock a woman just because she’s going to marry a rich man. Rich men want wives as well as poor men. I’m all for Katherine Dallas. You’re jealous, Lora, because she is so beautiful.”
Lora only smiled at this, and said:
“I’ve really nothing against her, except that I believe she had Alma turned out of her uncle’s house.”
“And why not?” demanded Maud Merrill. “No house is big enough for two families; and though I don’t know Miss Remsen well at all, I do know that she is a girl of strong will and decided opinions. They’d never be happy if Alma stayed there.”
“I can’t say as to all that,” I put in, determined to have my word, “but I think, with Lora, that the Dallas is a lady of deep finesse and Machiavellian cleverness.”
“Yes, just that!” cried Keeley Moore’s wife.
“Well, then,” said Maud, “if she snared that millionaire by her cleverness, she deserves her reward. And she deserves a peaceful home, which I doubt she’d have with a young girl bossing around, too.”
“Oh, you women!” and Moore wrung his hands in mock despair, “you’re making up all this. You don’t know a thing about it, really.”
“We can see,” said Lora, sagely. “And there’s no use prolonging this futile discussion. Time will show you how right I am, and meantime, we’d better all go to bed.”
Chapter II.
The Girl in the Canoe
My room at Variable Winds was cheery and comfortable. Bright-hued curtains, painted furniture and bowls full of exquisitely tinted California poppies gave the place a colourful effect that pleased my aesthetic tastes. A perfectly appointed bathroom added to my content and I concluded I would stay with the Moores as long as I could keep my welcome in good working order.
Keeley Moore was one of the best if not the best known detectives of the day, and while a quiet vacation would do him good, I was certain he was already itching to get back to his problems and mysteries, with which the city always supplied him.
I threw off my coat and put on a dressing gown, for the lake breezes were chill, and sat at a window for a final smoke.
I felt at peace with the world. Some houses give you that feeling, just as some others make you unreasonably nervous and irritable.
The moon had risen, a three-quarter or nearly full moon, and its shimmering light across the lake made me turn off my room lights and gaze out at the scene before me.
My room looked out on the lake, and the house itself was not more than a dozen yards from the water. The ground sloped gently down to a tiny bit of beach, a little crescent that had been selected for the site of the house. On the right of this placid little piece of shore was the boathouse, a large one, with canoes, rowboats and motor boats. Under the same roof was the bath house, and in front of that, out in the lake, were springboards, diving ladders and all the contrivances on which the bathers like to disport themselves.
To the left was a bit of wild, rocky shore, for the edge of the lake was greatly diversified and rocks abounded, both in and out of the water.
A line of light came across the lake, but was now and then blotted out as the swiftly drifting clouds obscured the moon.
I liked it better in the darkness, for the sight was impressive.
From my window I could see a great stretch of water, and as a background, dense black growth of trees, which came in many places down to the water’s edge.
Often these trees were on a slope and rose to a height almost to be called a hill, while again the ground stretched on a low-lying level.
As I looked, the details of the landscape became clearer and I discerned a few faint lights here and there in the houses.
The big house nearest us I took to be Pleasure Dome. Not only because it was the next house, but because I could dimly distinguish a large building surmounted by a gilded dome.
How could any man in his sober senses construct such a place to live in?
It seemed like a cross between the Boston State House and the Taj Mahal.
I was really anxious to go over there and see the thing at closer range. I decided to ask Moore to take me over the next day.
Suddenly the lights all went out and the house and its dome disappeared from view. Looking at my watch I saw it was just one o’clock and concluded that the master of the house had his home darkened at that hour.
But after I again accustomed my eyes to the darkness I could see the outlines of Pleasure Dome, and it looked infinitely more attractive in the half light than it had done in the brightness of its own illumination.
As a whole, though, the lake scene was depressing. It had a melancholy, dismal air that seemed to lay a damper on my spirits. It was like a cold, clammy hand resting on my forehead. I even shook my head impatiently, as if to fling it off, and then smiled at my own foolishness. But it persisted. The lake was mournful, it even seemed menacing.
With an exclamation of disgust at my own impressionableness, I sprang up from my chair, flashed on the lights and prepared for bed.
The bright, pleasant room restored my equilibrium or equanimity or whatever it was that had been jarred, and I found myself all ready for bed, in a peaceful, happy frame of mind.
I turned off the lights, and then the lake lured me back to a last glimpse of its wild, eerie beauty.
Again I flung on my robe and sat at the window. It seemed as if I couldn’t leave it. The black, sinister water, the dark shores, with deep hollows here and there, the waving, soughing trees, with thick underbrush beneath them, all seemed possessed of a spirit of evil, a frightful, uncanny spirit, that made me shiver with an unreasonable apprehension, that held me in thrall.
I have no use for premonitions, I have no faith in presentiments, but I had to admit to myself then a fear, a foreboding of some intangible, ghastly horror. Then would come the moonlight, pale and sickly now, and lasting but a moment before the clouds again blotted it out.
Yet I liked the darkness better, for the moon cast such horrendous shadows of those black trees into the lake that it seemed to people the lake with monstrous, maleficent beings, who leered and danced like devils.
Though I knew the hobgoblins were only the waving trees, distorted in the moonlight, I was none the less weak-minded enough to see portentous spectres that made my flesh creep.
With a half laugh and a half groan at my utter imbecility, I declared to myself that I would go to bed and go to sleep.
But as I started to rise from my chair, I saw something that made me sink back again.
The moon now was behind a light, translucent cloud, that caused a faint light on the lake.
Round a jutting corner I saw a canoe come into my line of vision.
A moment’s attention convinced me that it was no ghostly craft, but an ordinary canoe, propelled by a pair of human arms.
This touch of human companionship put to rout