CHAPTER XVI
A STRANGE MONITOR
IT was mid-June. A grateful breeze, tempering the hot afternoon, stirred the leaves and branches caressingly, eliciting from them in response, as though they voiced a friendly welcome, a low, whispering, musical rustle. Through the trees the sun played in flecked, shifting paths upon the lawn, weaving dotted patterns upon the soft, smooth, velvet sward. The vines, in full leaf now, covered the front of the house, the veranda, the porch, with a luxuriant mass of cool, inviting green; the flowers in their long beds, in bloom, blended their colours restfully against the darker background of the hedges. Like the glade of a little park it was, the warden's lawn, studded here and there with trees; while the quaint, old-fashioned house itself peeked shyly, with a charming, demure air of modesty, through the foliage of the giant willow at one corner of the veranda and a monarch elm at the other whose branches almost interlaced.
From the direction of the hedge that bordered the village street came the steady whir of a lawn-mower. And, in the hammock, swung under the shade of the elm, Janet Rand laid down her book, open at her place, across her lap, and, lying back, clasped her hands behind her head.
Reading that afternoon, somehow, did not seem to hold her attention—her mind kept wandering from the text. A little pucker gathered on her forehead and she
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