When it appeared that Bates had said all that he was going to say, Alec Trenholme sat pondering the problem of this girl’s disappearance with more mental energy than he had before given to it.  Knowing the place now, he knew that what Bates and Saul had averred was true—­that there were but two ways by which any one could leave it while water was unfrozen, one by the boat, and the other by striking at random across the hill to the back of the farm—­a route that could only lead either to one of several isolated farms, or, by a forty-mile tramp round by the nearest river bridge, to the railway.  At no farmhouse had she been seen, and the journey by the bridge was too long to have been accomplished before the snow storm must have impeded her.  It was in attempting this journey, Bates was convinced, that she had perished.  There was, of course, another possibility that had been mooted at Turrifs Settlement; but the testimony of Bates and Saul, agreeing in the main points, had entirely silenced it.  Trenholme, thinking of this now, longed to question more nearly, yet hardly dared.

“Do you think she could have gone mad?  People sometimes do go stark mad suddenly.  Because, if so, and if you could be mistaken in thinking you saw her in the house when you went—­”

The Scotchman was looking keenly at him with sharp eyes and haggard face.  “I understand ye,” he said, with a sigh of resignation, “the noise o’ the thing has been such that there’s no evil men haven’t thought of me, or madness of her.  Ye think the living creature ye saw rise from the coffin was, maybe, the dead man’s daughter?”

“I think it was much too big for a woman.”

“Oh, as to that, she was a good height.”  Perhaps, with involuntary thought of what might have been, he drew himself up to his full stature as he said, “A grand height for a woman; but as to this idea of yours, I’ll not say ye’re insulting her by it, though! that’s true too; but I’ve had the same notion; and now I’ll tell ye something.  She was not mad; she took clothes; she left everything in order.  Was that the act of a maniac? and if she wasn’t mad, clean out of her wits, would she have done such a thing as ye’re thinking of?”

“No”—­thoughtfully—­“I should think not.”

“And, furthermore; if she had wished to do it, where is it she could have laid him?  D’ye think I haven’t looked the ground over?  There’s no place where she could have buried him, and to take him to the lake was beyond her strength.”  There was nothing of the everyday irascibility about his voice; the patience of a great grief was upon him, as he argued away the gross suspicion.

“That settles it.”  Trenholme said this willingly enough.

“Yes, it settles it; for if there was a place where the earth was loose I dug with my own hands down to the very rock, and neither man nor woman lay under it.”

Trenholme was affected; he again renounced his suspicion.