He topped a long slope, from which the trail dipped gradually to the very edge of the lake at the foot of a wide ravine gashed up the side of the mountain to his right to the plateau below the forbidding black granite battlements of the Cup of Nannabijou. Almost on his immediate left lay the tiny Island of Amethyst with its soft wooded groves and grotesque, old-fashioned bungalows.
Hammond’s eyes swept from the island to the shoreline opposite—then he stopped dead in his tracks with a sharp intaking of breath.
Seated upon a fallen tree-trunk near the water’s edge where her canoe was drawn up, with the lake and the dense foliage above and around her for a background, was a young woman whose charm of face and figure held him for the moment in spellbound admiration.
It was the Girl with the High-arched Eyebrows; she whom he had now twice met under unusual circumstances, once in the parlour car of a transcontinental train and again just below the doorway of Acey Smith’s office at the pulp camp. She was obviously waiting for some one. So—so—could it have been that she had actually sent for him?
She was looking straight at him, expectancy, wonder in her great blue eyes. With an effort he regained part of his composure and plunged precipitously down the trail against a wild impulse to turn on his heel and flee.
Somehow, he finally stood before her with bared head and wildly-beating pulse.
“I—I came in response to your note.” He did not stammer it so awkwardly as he feared he would.
“My note?” The finely-pencilled brows were elevated in bewitching perplexity. “_My_ note?”
“Yes—the note you—I have it here somewhere.” Hammond at first searched vainly through his pockets for the tiny bit of paper. He felt he was somehow making a confounded ass of himself.
“But I—I wrote you no note. There must be some mistake.” There was the faintest trace of amused curiosity in her tones.
Hammond suddenly felt like one who drops from the clouds into a pit of gloom. Either he had been humbugged or he had accosted the wrong woman.
At last his fingers encountered the little folded square. He opened it out and passed it to her. “You see it was unsigned,” he explained. “I was not in a position to know who it was from—”