The Daily Monitor Leader

silence. Connie made some excuse about the twins and rose and left the room.

Kathy sat there staring at the golden-topped egg on her plate.

Then with a preoccupied air she picked up her coffee and a piece of toast—and ambled off in the direction of the living room without a word of apology.

About a week after Margaret and I had come down to Kraiktower that spring a young man had presented himself at my front door. I thought then, and still do, that he was one of the ugliest men I had ever seen.

But he was ugly in a virile masculine way. There was a wholesome smell of outdoors and pipe smoke and tweeds about him, and when he smiled it lit up his somber face like the sun coming from behind a cloud.

He explained, that day when he first appeared, that he was a writer of detective stories, that his name was Clint Mattison, that he could pay me in advance, and that he wanted to rent the Cottage.

The Cottage is a rustic studio sort of cabin built down in the woods by Michael as a honeymoon hideaway for Walter and Harriet. They spent all their summers there until Harriet became ill, but Connie will never go near the place—jealousy, I suppose.

It is too far from the big house to use as servant's quarters, and the last few seasons I have rented it to respectable vacationing couples attracted to our neighborhood by the excellent fishing in the lake.

Well, Clint Mattison wasn't a couple but I saw no harm in a young man burying himself alone in the woods for the summer if it enabled him to turn out better detective yarns. A good many I have read would have been all the better for a little burying of the plot or the author, or both. So I rented him the Cottage.

What I didn't know at the time, however, was that he was also an amateur glider enthusiast and that using the hill at the end of the lake as his taking-off point he was liable to come bumping down upon the landscape in a suicide contraption any time he could find someone with a car and a mind to give him a tow.

That morning, the first after Kathy came down, Clint Mattison came to pay another month's rent and Margaret showed him into my study at the end of the downstairs hall. I gave him a receipt, and quipped him about his recent landing in Farmer Miller's pig pen. He blushed, as he did easily, and started to go.

I walked into the hall with him, and Kathy—she had changed into a flamboyant black and white polka-dotted sport dress and a short black wool box coat—came pell-mell down the stairs and almost ran over him in that arrogant way of hers.

Clint Mattison stood staring after her. Katherine is quite an eyeful. "My granddaughter," I explained with the feeling that I was talking to air.

The man's gray eyes gradually came back into focus on me, and as he collected his presence of mind and bade me good morning all over again, I heard the roar of a motor. So I knew Kathy must have taken one of the cars out.