CHAPTER

       I Of a Great White Bird Upon a Lake
      II An Indoor Tempest
     III A Whim
      IV The Voice of the Open Country
       V The Phantom that Rose from the Bottle
      VI Baron Tregar
     VII Themar
    VIII After Sunset
      IX In a Storm-Haunted Wood
       X On the Ridge Road
      XI In the Camp of the Gypsy Lady
     XII A Bullet in Arcadia
    XIII A Woodland Guest
     XIV By the Backwater Pool
      XV Jokai of Vienna
     XVI The Young Man of the Sea
    XVII In Which the Baron Pays
   XVIII Nomads
     XIX A Nomadic Minstrel
      XX The Romance of Minstrelsy
     XXI At the Gray of Dawn
    XXII Sylvan Suitors
   XXIII Letters
    XXIV The Lonely Camper
     XXV A December Snowstorm
    XXVI An Accounting
   XXVII The Song of the Pine-Wood Sparrow
  XXVIII The Nomad of the Fire-Wheel
    XXIX The Black Palmer
     XXX The Unmasking
    XXXI The Reckoning
   XXXII Forest Friends
  XXXIII By the Winding Creek
   XXXIV The Moon Above the Marsh
    XXXV The Wind of the Okeechobee
   XXXVI Under the Live Oaks
  XXXVII In the Glades
 XXXVIII In Philip’s Wigwam
   XXXIX Under the Wild March Moon
      XL The Victory
     XLI In Mic-co’s Lodge
    XLII The Rain Upon the Wigwam
   XLIII The Rival Campers
    XLIV The Tale of a Candlestick
     XLV The Gypsy Blood
    XLVI In the Forest
   XLVII “The Marshes of Glynn”
  XLVIII On the Lake Shore
    XLIX Mr. Dorrigan
       L The Other Candlestick
      LI In the Adirondacks
     LII Extracts from the Letters of Norman Westfall
    LIII By Mic-co’s Pool
     LIV On the Westfall Lake

ILLUSTRATIONS

   “Excellency, as a gentleman who is not a coward it behooves you to
   explain.” . . . Frontispiece

   Diane swung lightly up the forest path

   White girl and Indian maid then clasped hands

   “No, I may not take your hand.”

CHAPTER I

OF A GREAT WHITE BIRD UPON A LAKE

Spring was stealing lightly over the Connecticut hills, a shy, tender thing of delicate green winging its way with witch-rod over the wooded ridges and the sylvan paths of Diane Westfall’s farm.  And with the spring had come a great hammering by the sheepfold and the stables where a smiling horde of metropolitan workmen, sheltered by night in the rambling old farmhouse, built an ingenious house upon wheels and flirted with the house-maids.

Radiantly the spring swept from delicate shyness into a bolder glow of leaf and flower.  Dogwood snowed along the ridges, Solomon’s seal flowered thickly in the bogs, and following the path to the lake one morning with Rex, a favorite St. Bernard, at her heels, Diane felt with a thrill that the summer itself had come in the night with a wind-flutter of wild flower and the fluting of nesting birds.