‘Then I suppose,’ he said, ’that some fellow got aboard her between the puffs of wind.  I hope it was none of those Syndicate men; they’re a fast lot.  What was his name?  What had he to say for himself?’

‘She was flying far too fast for any one to get aboard,’ asserted Helen.  ’I don’t know what his name was; he didn’t say anything; I don’t know where he went to.’

Then the uncle suggested toddy in an undertone to his wife.  The aunt looked over her spectacles with solicitude, and then arose and put her niece to bed.

When Helen was left alone she lay looking out at the stars that again were shining; she wondered and wondered; perhaps the reason that she came to no definite conclusion was that she liked the state of wonder better.  Helen was a modern girl; she had friends who were spiritualists, friends who were theosophists, friends who were ‘high church’ and believed in visions of angels.

In the morning Johns’ boat was found tethered as usual to the buoy in front of his house.

Long before this the Syndicate had suspected the Baby’s attachment.  The strength of that attachment they did not suspect in the least; never having seen depths in the Baby, they supposed there were none.  They had fallen into the habit of taking the Baby by the throat and asking him in trenchant tones, ‘Have you spoken to her?’ The Baby found it convenient to be able to give a truthful negative, not that he would have minded fibbing in the least, but in this case the fib would certainly have been detected; he could not expect his goddess to enter into any clandestine parley and keep his secret.

Had the Baby taken the matter less to heart he would have been more rash in asserting his independence, but he meditated some great step and ’lay low.’  What or when the irrevocable move was to be he had no definite idea, the thought of it was only as yet an exalted swelling of mind and heart.

There was a period, after the affair of the boat, when he spent a good deal of time haunting the sacred precincts of the house where Helen lived.  The precincts consisted of a dusty lane, a flat, ugly fenced field where a cow and a horse grazed, and a place immediately about the house covered with thick grass and shaded by maple trees.  There were some shrubs too, behind which one could hide if necessary, but they were prickly, uncomfortable to nestle against, and the unmown grass absorbed an immense quantity of dew.  In imagination, however, the Baby wandered on pastoral slopes and in classic shades.  At first he paid his visits at night when the family were asleep, and he slipped about so quietly that no one but the horse and the cow need know where he went or what he did.  At length, however, he grew more bold, and took his way across the maple grove going and coming from other evening errands.  Trespassing is not much of a fault at the lake of St. Jean.  The Baby became expert in dodging hastily by, with his eyes upon the windows; the dream of his life was to see the gymnastics performed again; at length it was realised.