By the pool with a great mass of dripping lilies at his side to carry back to camp, Philip stared frowningly at the tangled float of foliage at his feet.  Somehow that ugly flash of suspicion had persisted.  Why had the Baron wished him to stay in the camp of Diane? . . .  What was the portent of his peculiar interest anyway?

Philip sighed.

“Do you know, Nero,” he confided suddenly, patting the dog’s shaggy head, “my life is developing certain elements of intrigue and mystery exceedingly offensive to my spread-eagle tastes.  There’s a knife and a bullet now, Johnny’s two men and the auto, and a cuff and a most mysterious link between our lady and the Baron.  I’ll be hanged if I like any of it.  And why in thunder did Themar crib an aeroplane and bump his fool head?” He fell suddenly thoughtful.

“As for you, old top,” he added presently, “you ought to go home.  Dick will be fussing.”

Nero waggled ambiguously.  Philip nodded.

“Right, old man,” he admitted with sudden gravity.  “I can always depend upon you to set me right.  It’s nothing like so essential for you to go as it is for me.  You did right to mention it.  I ought to dig out—­all the more because the Baron wants me to stay—­but I’ve been thinking a bit this afternoon and unusual problems demand unusual solutions.  You’ll grant that?” Nero politely routed an excursive bug from his path and lay down to listen.

“Mr. Poynter!” called a voice from the darkling trees behind him.

Mr. Poynter smiled and fell deliberately to filling the bowl of his wildwood pipe.  Gnarled and twisted and marvelously eccentric was this wildwood pipe and therefore an object of undoubted interest.  The bowl had somehow eluded Philip’s desperate effort to keep it of reasonable dimensions and required a Gargantuan supply of tobacco.

“Mr. Poynter!”

“My Lord!” murmured Philip, staring ruefully into the pipe-bowl, “the infernal thing is bottomless!  Exit another can of tobacco.  I’ll have to ask Johnny to buy me a barrel.”  And Philip flung the empty can into the pool whence a frog leaped with a frightened croak.

“Philip!”

“Mademoiselle!” said Philip pleasantly.

Darkly lovely, Diane’s eyes met his with a glance of indignant reproach.  Somehow her lips were like a scarlet wound in the gypsy brown skin and her cheeks were hot with color.

“A wildwood elf of scarlet and brown!” thought Philip and hospitably flicked away a twig or so with his handkerchief that she might sit down.

“There’s water plantain over there in the bog,” he said lazily, “and swamp honeysuckle.  And see,” he turned out his pockets, “swamp apples.  Queer, aren’t they?  Johnny says they’re good to eat.  The honeysuckle was full of them.”

Diane bit daintily into the peculiar juicy pulp.

“A man of your pernicious good humor,” she said greatly provoked, “is a menace to civilization.  You sap all the wholesome fire of one’s most cherished resentment.”