GAY RUSHES INTO A QUARREL AND SECURES A KISS At dawn next morning Jonathan Gay, who had spent a restless night in his uncle's room, came out into the circular drive with his gun on his shoulder, and strolled in the direction of the meadows beyond the haunted Poplar Spring at the end of the lawn.

It was a rimy October morning, and the sun rising slowly above the shadowy aspens in the graveyard, shone dimly through the transparent silver veil that hung over the landscape.

The leaves, still russet and veined with purple on the boughs overhead, lay in brown wind-rifts along the drive, where they had been blown during the night before the changeful weather had settled into a frosty stillness at daybreak.
"By Jove, it's these confounded acorns that keep me awake," thought Gay, with a nervous irritation which was characteristic of him when he had been disturbed.

"A dozen ghosts couldn't have managed to make themselves more of a nuisance." Being an emotional person in a spasmodic and egotistical fashion, he found himself thinking presently of Janet Merryweather, as he had thought more than once during the wakeful hours of the night.

He felt, somehow, that she had been treated detestably, and he was angry with his uncle for having left him, as he described it, "in such a deuce of a hole." "One can't acknowledge the girl, I suppose, though for the matter of that those tell-tale eyes of hers are not only an acknowledgment, but a condemnation." With a low whistle, he brought his gun quickly down from his shoulder as a partridge, rising with a gentle whir from the red-topped orchard grass in front of him, skimmed lightly into the golden pathway the sun made through the mist.