“Who wouldn’t be jolly in a party where Red was one?  Did you ever see the dear fellow so absolutely irresistible?  Sometimes I think there’s a bit of hypnotism about Red, he gets us all so completely.”

“What are you two whispering about?” said a voice behind them, and they turned to look into the brilliant hazel eyes both were thinking of at the moment.

“You,” King answered promptly.

“Rebelling against the autocracy of the Indian Chief?”

“No.  Prostrating ourselves before his bulky form.  He’s some Indian to-day.”

“He will be before the day is over, I promise you.  He’ll call a council around the campfire to-night, and plenty pipes will be smoked.  Everybody do as Big Chief says, eh?”

“Sure thing, Geronimo; that’s what we came for.”

“You don’t know what you came for.  Absolutely preposterous this thing is—­surgeon going to visit his case and bringing along a lot of people who don’t know a mononuclear leucocyte from an eosinophile cell.”

“Do you know a vortex filament from a diametral plane?” demanded King.

Burns laughed.  “Come, let’s be off!  I must spare half an hour to show Mrs. King a certain view somewhat off the main line.”

The afternoon was gone before they could have believed it, detours though there were several, as there usually are in a road-mending season.  As the car emerged from a long run through wooded country and passed a certain landmark carefully watched for by Red Pepper, he spoke to Aleck.

“Run slowly now, please.  And be ready to turn to the left at a point that doesn’t show much beforehand.”

They were proceeding through somewhat sparsely settled country, though marked here and there by comfortable farmhouses of a more than ordinarily attractive type—­apparently homes of prosperous people with an eye to appearances.  Then quite suddenly the car, rounding a turn, came into a different region, one of cultivated wildness, of studied effects so cleverly disguised that they would seem to the unobservant only the efforts of nature at her best.  A long, heavily shaded avenue of oaks, with high, untrimmed hedges of shrubbery on each side, curved enticingly before them, and all at once, Burns, looking sharply ahead, called, “There, by that big pine, Aleck—­to the left.”  In a minute more the car turned in at a point where a rough stone gateway marked the entrance to nothing more extraordinary than a pleasant wood.

“Patient lives in a hut in the forest?” King inquired with interest.  “Or a rich man’s hunting lodge?”

“You’ll soon see.”  Burns’s eyes were ahead; a slight smile touched his lips.

The car swept around curve after curve of the wood, came out upon the shore of a small lake and, skirting it halfway round, plunged into a grove of pines.  Then, quite without warning, there showed beyond the pines a long, white-plumed row of small trees of a sort unmistakable—­in May.  Beside the row lay a garden, gay with all manner of spring flowers, and farther, through the trees, began to gleam the long, low outlines of a great house.