He was trying to persuade himself that there could not be standing-room when he rejoined Margery--herself the best imaginable refutation of the old-wives' tales--at the gate in the great steel grille. Man-like, he was ready to be forgiven and comforted; and there was at least oblivion in her charming little shudder as the custodian shot the bolts of the gate to let them out.
"_Br-r-r!_" she shivered, "I can never stand here and look at the free people out there without fancying myself in a prison. It must be a dreadful thing to be shut away behind bolts and bars, forgotten by everybody, and yet yourself unable to forget. Do you ever have such foolish thoughts, Mr. Griswold?"
For one poignant second fear leaped alive again and he called himself no better than a lost man. But the eyes that were lifted to his were the eyes of a questioning child, so guilelessly innocent that he immediately suffered another relapse into the pit of self-despisings.
"You have made me your poor prisoner, Miss Grierson," he said, speaking to his own thought rather than to her question. And when they reached the sidewalk and the trap: "May I bid you good-by here and go to my own place?"
"Of course not!" she protested. "Mr. Raymer is coming to dinner to-night and he will drive you over to Mrs. Holcomb's afterward, if you really think you must go."
And for the first time in their comings and goings she let him lift her to the high driving-seat.
Matthew Broffin had been two weeks and half of a third an unobtrusive spy upon the collective activities of the Wahaskan social group which included the Farnhams before he decided that nothing more could be gained by further delay.
By this time he knew all there was to be known about Miss Farnham; the houses she visited, the somewhat limited circle of her intimates and the vastly wider one of her acquaintances, her comings and goings in the town, her preference for church dissipations over the other sort, and for croquet over lawn tennis.
Also, he had a more minute knowledge which would have terrified her if she had suspected that any strange man was keeping an accurately tabulated note-book record of her waking employments. He knew at what hour she breakfasted, what time in the forenoons she spent upon her Chautauqua readings, how much of her day was given to the care of her invalid aunt, and, most important item of all, how, in the afternoons, when her father was at his town office and the invalid was taking a nap in her room, Miss Charlotte was usually alone in the living-rooms of the two-storied house in Lake Boulevard: practically so for four days out of the seven; actually so on Wednesdays and Fridays when Hilda Larsen, the Swedish maid of all work, had her afternoons off.