Inwardly he felt himself in no humorous mood as he retraced his steps to Churchill.  He had thought to begin his work of clearing up the puzzling situation with Gregson, and Gregson had failed him completely by his persistence in the belief that Miss Brokaw was the girl whose face he had seen more than a week before.  Was it possible, after all, that the ship had touched at some point up the coast?  The supposition was preposterous.  Yet before rejoining the Brokaws he sought out the captain and found that the company’s vessel had come directly from Halifax without a change or stop in her regular course.  The word of the company’s captain cleared up his doubts in one direction; it mystified him more than ever in another.  He was convinced that Gregson had not seen Miss Brokaw until that morning.  But who was Eileen’s double?  Where was she at this moment?  What peculiar combination of circumstance had drawn them both to Churchill at this particularly significant time?  It was impossible for him not to associate the girl whom Gregson had encountered, and who so closely resembled Eileen, with Lord Fitzhugh and the plot against his company.  And it struck him with a certain feeling of dread that, if his suspicions were true, Jeanne and Pierre must also be mixed up in the affair.  For had not Jeanne, in her error, greeted Eileen as though she were a dear friend?

He went directly to the factor’s house, and knocked at the door opening into the rooms occupied by Brokaw and his daughter.  Brokaw admitted him, and at Philip’s searching glance about the room he nodded toward a closed inner door and said: 

“Eileen is resting.  It’s been a hard trip on her, Phil, and she hasn’t slept for two consecutive nights since we left Halifax.”

Philip’s keen glance told him that Brokaw himself had not slept much.  The promoter’s eyes were heavy, with little puffy bags under them.  But otherwise he betrayed no signs of unrest or lack of rest.  He motioned Philip to a chair close to a huge fireplace in which a pile of birch was leaping into flame, offered him a cigar, and plunged immediately into business.

“It’s hell, Philip,” he said, in a hard, quiet voice, as though he were restraining an outburst of passion with effort.  “In another three months we’d have been on a working basis, earning dividends.  I’ve even gone to the point of making contracts that show us five hundred per cent, profit.  And now—­this!”

He dashed his half-burned cigar into the fire, and viciously bit the end from another.

Philip was lighting his own, and there was a moment’s silence, broken sharply by the financier.

“Are your men prepared to fight?”

“If it’s necessary,” replied Philip.  “We can at least depend upon a part of them, especially the men at Blind Indian Lake.  But—­this fighting—­Why do you think it will come to that?  If there is fighting we are ruined.”