THE MAID OF THE MILL
was practical, too, for all he was so brilliant and winning. It actually troubled him that people should believe anything but what he called 'the strictly logical,' and he thought Joan's ideas far too flexible and credulous. It was really for Joan's sake, he said in joke, whom he rather suspected of spiritualistic leanings, that he intended to make the excursion into the country. And he would tell nobody. He would make no inquiries. He would conduct the search along somewhat unusual lines, he declared. One of them should sleep in the room. At one o'clock precisely the other should quietly mount a ladder fixed just where the mythical ladder had been and enter the room in that way, thus preventing any mischievous practical jokes from without, and insuring help to the man within, should he need it.
"And Joan agreed to this. He was interested himself, and he'd have been as eager and scornful as Darby if it hadn't occurred to him—for he was a terribly literal fellow—that four tragedies, sad as these had been, and all unexplained, couldn't be accounted for by chance nor made less sad even
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