“It is. When you come to think it over, you will agree with me.”
Lyndsay was silent a moment. Then he called, “Tom! Tom! I am going up to the Island Camp; put the canoe in the water.”
“What are you going to do, Archie!” asked Margaret.
“I want to talk to Carington. He knows all these people; has known them for years.”
“Shall you tell him what my own belief is?” said Anne.
“But,” exclaimed Margaret, “do you not think—”
“No. No, dear, I don’t think at all as yet. I have no material for thinking—very little, at least.” He spoke with unhabitual impatience. “Evidence is what we want.”
He was annoyed by this mysterious crime in the midst of his idle hours; troubled by his wife’s distress; and finally, if but to a slight extent, irritated at Anne’s unreasoning dash at a decisive conclusion. Perhaps he was the more disturbed because, on hearing her, he had at once begun to put together facts, always within his own knowledge, which he felt should have caused him to have gone, under guidance of reason, toward the goal which she had reached at a bound.
“I shall be back in three or four hours. Do not keep the dinner waiting. Good-by.”
“But, Archibald, do listen to me. It is not about—about this—” And she followed him as she spoke, and, at the edge of the cliff, said a few words hastily, but with earnestness.
“No,” he said, so that Anne heard. “I see—I see, of course; but there is no help for it; and, after all, Carington is not a man—” And the rest was lost to Anne’s ear.
“Perhaps not,” said Margaret. “I suppose you know best.” And she went back to Anne.
When Lyndsay walked up the beach at the Island Camp, it was already dark. In the dinner-tent, on camp-stools, the two men were gaily discussing such events as in a fishing camp are always uppermost—how this or that salmon behaved, the weather, the water, or the eternal black-flies.
The cook had just set on the table a dish of broiled salmon, and said, as he did so:
“There’s a canoe at the beach—Mr. Lyndsay, I think.”
“Come to ask your intentions, Fred,” said Ellett, laughing.
“Hush, I hear him coming. I wonder what it is he wants.” As Carington spoke, he threw open the fly of the tent. “Come in, Mr. Lyndsay; you are just in time. Bring the soup back, Jim.”