He spoke the name carelessly, his manner and tone implying that there could be no debating the subject. I was prepared for evasion but not for this cool denial of his identity.
"But this afternoon, Mr. Holbrook, I chanced to follow the creek to this point and I saw--"
"You probably saw that house-boat down there, that is my shop. As I tell you, I am a maker of canoes. They have, I hope, some reputation--honest hand-work; and my output is limited. I shall be deeply chagrined if you have never heard of the Hartridge canoe."
He shook his head in mock grief, walked to a cabarette and took up a pipe and filled it. He was carrying off the situation well; but his coolness angered me.
"Mr. Hartridge, I am sorry that I must believe that heretofore you have been known as Holbrook. The fact was clenched for me this afternoon, quite late, as I stood in the path below here. I heard quite distinctly a young woman call you father."
"So? Then you're an eavesdropper as well as a trespasser!"--and the man laughed.
"We will admit that I am both," I flared angrily.
"The young woman who called you father and whom you answered from the deck of the house-boat is a person I know."
He calmly puffed his pipe, holding the bowl in his fingers, his idle hand thrust into his trousers pocket.
"It was Miss Helen Holbrook that I saw here, Mr. Hartridge."
He started, then recovered himself and peered into the pipe bowl for a second; then looked at me with an amused smile on his face.
"You certainly have a wonderful imagination. The person you saw, if you saw any one on your visit to these premises to-day, was my daughter, Rosalind Hartridge. Where do you think you knew her, Mr. Donovan?"
"I saw her this morning, at St. Agatha's School. I not only saw her, but I talked with her, and I am neither deaf nor blind."
He pursed his lips and studied me, with his head slightly tilted to one side, in a cool fashion that I did not like.
"Rather an odd place to have met this Miss--what name, did you say?--Miss Helen Holbrook;--a closed school-house, and that sort of thing."
"You may ease your mind on that point; she was with your sister, her aunt, Mr. Holbrook; and I want you to understand that your following Miss Patricia Holbrook here is infamous and that I have no other business but to protect her from you."