Excerpt: ...from him. I am unable to state at the moment whether the wound was a mortal one, but from my knowledge of your family affairs I judge that you would hardly be grieved if you never saw him again." He was shocked at his own levity. The thing was not in any aspect a laughing matter. Amid other experiences he had freed himself for a few days of the thought of Putney Congdon lying dead in a lonely cleft of the Maine rocks, but meeting the man's family in this fashion was almost as disconcerting as a visit from Congdon's ghost. The Congdons had eaten their meal hurriedly and were already paying their check. He watched them move away toward the interior of the park, marked their direction and chose a parallel course with a view to keeping them in sight. Occasionally he caught glimpses of the children dancing ahead of their mother. The remote paths she chose for the ramble confirmed his suspicion that she was on guard against the threatened seizure of the youngsters by their father, and having been driven from Bailey Harbor was now in town to formulate her plans for the future, or perhaps only whiling away the hours until she could escape to some other place in the country. Unable to argue himself out of a feeling that Mrs. Congdon's troubles were no affair of his he was beset by the fear that he might be doomed for the rest of his life to follow them, to view them from afar off, never speaking to them, but led on by the guilty knowledge that he was a dark factor in their lives. He became so engrossed that he lost track of them for a time; then a turn of the path brought him close upon them. Mrs. Congdon was sitting on a bench under a big elm and the children were joyously romping on the lawn in front of her, playing with a toy balloon to which a bit of bark had been fastened. They would toss it in the air and jump and catch it while the weight prevented its escape. A gust of wind caught it as Archie passed and drove it across his path, while the children...