I

As the old man, after shoving the package into the safe, piled the money in on top of it, he was conscious of being watched. At the moment, you could have heard a lizard move. With a lizard’s rapidity, he turned. There was no one. Save for himself⁠—for the safe, the chairs, the books, the immense table⁠—the large, high-ceiled room was vacant.

For a moment he hesitated. Then, at once going to the table, he touched a button, sat down, and began to write.

898 West Eighty-ninth Street, New York, 4th November, 1915

I, George Gorgias Vulper, declare this to be my last will and testament.

I direct⁠—

At the door came a knock, and a withered servant, his face inextricably wrinkled, appeared. Vulper looked up.

“Archibald, telephone to Doctor Dix. Ask him to come here at once.”

“Yes, sir.”

Before the servant could go, Vulper again was at it.

I give, devise, and bequeath to my son, Michael Vulper, the copyright of my work entitled “Commentaries on the Sutras of Patanjali.” I give, devise, and bequeath to my nephew, Arthur Glendenning, the sum of one dollar, free from inheritance tax and executors’ fees. I give, devise, and bequeath to the director and curators of the British Museum, London, my manuscript entitled “Alpha and Omega.” I give, devise, and bequeath to Shri Shankira my best wishes here and hereafter. The rest and residue of my property, of whatever kind, nature, and description, and wheresoever situated, of which I die seized and possessed, I give, devise, and bequeath to my ward, Camille Marcy, and to her heirs, executors, and assigns forever. I appoint the Amsterdam Trust Company⁠—

The hurrying pen tripped and made a blot. Before Vulper could dry it, there was another knock, and a man with eyeglasses and a professional beard came in.

Vulper nodded at him.

“Dix, I want you to witness my will⁠—you and Archibald. Will you look at it?”

The physician took the paper, glanced at it, and asked:

“Where is the manuscript?”

Vulper motioned at the safe.

“In that package under the junk.”

Dix moved over and looked in.

“There seems to be no end to that junk. You ought to⁠—”

“Only ten thousand,” Vulper interrupted. “If it looks big, it’s because it’s all in twenty-dollar bills. I intended it for Mike, but I’ve changed my mind.”

“Yes, he told me. He was in my office today.”

“What about?”

“Several things. And you leave him a copyright!” Dix, examining the will again, exclaimed. “That’s very paternal. I doubt if it will stand.”

“Mike won’t contest it. Besides, he’s nobody’s fool. He’ll get along.”

Dix rattled the paper.

“It’s a pity, though, about his appearance. It would handicap anyone else. But really, now, this nonsense about Shri! If the facts were known, you’d be judged incompetent and the will thrown out.”

Vulper took it in.

“You’re probably right. I’ll do it over and omit that.”

“And you leave everything to Miss Marcy?”

“I can’t do otherwise. It came to me from her father.”

“Well, it’s none of my business. But that manuscript, now. If it were read in court, it would queer your will. It’s all like Shri⁠—the result of auditory and ocular hallucinations.”

Vulper nodded.

“To you⁠—yes. You’re a physician⁠—therefore, a materialist. You believe, as brutes do, only in the reality of things. And yet, as a physician, you ought to recognize the potentialities of the pineal gland. They have taken me to strange places; they have shown me strange things. I can no more prove it to you than I can dazzle a blind man. But the fact that I can see things which to you are invisible should be as comprehensible as that a composer can hear combinations of sounds to which you are deaf.”

“Oh, as for that, if I wanted to, I could see things myself. With morphine, apparitions can be scientifically produced. Only we don’t call them apparitions; we call them manifestations of morbid activity in certain clusters of the brain cells.” The physician paused and added: “That reminds me. Are you still taking chloral? You are? I told you not to. It’s a stupid thing to take at any age, but at yours it’s fatal.”

Vulper smiled. He was old and he looked it, but his face displayed that strength which is possessed only by those who know neither greed nor envy, neither hope nor fear. In strength such as that, there is infinite indulgence, equal unconcern; and that his smile expressed.

“If you’re trying to alarm me, you’ll hardly succeed. Only the unevolved fear death. What they should fear is life.”

Dix, who had been standing, sat down.

“Mr. Vulper, you have nothing to complain of. Life has treated you very well.”

“Hasn’t it, now? It’s been a wonderful experience. I didn’t have a dollar. I haven’t earned one since, and yet I have a quarter of a million, for which, now that my manuscript is done, I have no longer the slightest need.”

“Yes, you told me. Miss Marcy’s father divided his property between you and his daughter and made you her guardian.”

“And in so doing, afforded me the leisure to write that manuscript. It was more than decent of him⁠—particularly as he had no other reason than that I saw things concerning him, things that affected him vitally, things that at first he could not credit, but that⁠—”

“Things of the same order as Shri?” the physician, with professional intolerance, got in.

Vulper sat back on his hobby.

“Totally different. I can understand, though, that you don’t believe in him. Yet I showed you his letter.”

“A letter⁠—yes. One that any crank might have sent you. It mentioned some book or other and warned you of the author’s fate.”

Vulper raised a hand.

“This country is full of cranks. I doubt if one of them ever heard of the book, or of Delormel who wrote it. The book, entitled La Période Solaire⁠—‘The Solar Period’⁠—was published in France. There, the law requires that of every book published, two copies shall be deposited in the National Library. The arrangements in that institution were such that no book had ever been stolen from it. Two copies of this book were deposited there. In twenty-four hours, they had vanished. In twenty-four hours, not a copy of the book was obtainable anywhere, and the man who wrote it was killed.”

Dix sniffed.

“By Shri?”

“Or some other Brahman.”

“But why?”

“Because the book revealed secrets that the esoteric sections of the Upanishads contain and which only the Brahman hierarchy may approach.”

“And Delormel got at them?”

“If you want to put it in that way, yes. Only he did it in the same manner in which I secured the data for my manuscript⁠—out of the fourth dimension.”

Dix, plucking at his beard, said, and severely enough:

“The fourth dimension is a mathematical dream.”

Serenely the old man nodded.

“To the mathematician, perhaps. But not to the occultist. To him it is an actual plane on which he functions at will. That is what Swedenborg did, what Delormel did, what I have done. In the fourth dimension, I saw the past and the future. My manuscript contains them both. I say, Dix! You’re thinking I ought to be locked up.”

So neat and sure was the thrust that before it the physician backed.

“No, not that exactly. But I was thinking that if any other man told me what you have, I’d stand ready to sign his commitment.”

“Which reminds me. It’s my will I want you to sign, or, rather, to witness. I told you Mike wouldn’t contest it. That’s because I took a look ahead today and I couldn’t see any contest. But then I couldn’t see any will either, and because of that, and of other things, I’m in a hurry to make one. What is it, Archibald?”

Noiselessly the withered servant had entered.

“Doctor Dix’s secretary has telephoned. Mrs. Gehm is dying.”

Dix picked up his hat. With one hand, the old man stayed him; the other he pressed to his head.

“Mrs. Gehm? I’ve got her. Her name belies her, though. She’s a fat woman in a wig. She’d die of a motor accident in a thunderstorm.” He dropped his hands and added: “This is November. Assuming that the lady remains in New York, she has still five or six months to the good.”

Dix laughed; he couldn’t help it. The portrait of his patient had been exact.

“All the same,” he said, “I’ll have to go. I’ll be back, though, shortly.”

“Thank you. Please do,” replied Vulper, who scribbled on the will and tore it in two.

Meanwhile, in the drawing room on the floor below, Camille Marcy, in breeches and boots, a man’s coat and a derby, was being talked at by Glendenning, Vulper’s nephew, a superior young man who did something in the insurance line and whose long face gave him the thoroughbred air of a horse.

Camille lacked that distinction. A nice, candid-looking girl of sweet-and-twenty, with good eyes, good features, a very good nose, and fair hair⁠—which was docked⁠—she had the appearance of having no nonsense, or at any rate very little of it, about her.

The room, comfortably and long since summarily furnished with articles selected haphazard by an occultist in a hurry, was ugly, but not depressing, for its ugliness was attenuated by this girl, whom Glendenning was asking to marry him.

Like getting up in the morning or having dinner, it was a habit of his. Camille had money of her own, enough for two⁠—enough even in New York, where living costs everybody a little more than he has got⁠—and Glendenning, who lived in a boarding house and had nothing except what he made, saw no reason why she should not honorably support him. He quite counted on it.

But Camille had no more idea of taking him than she had of jumping out of the window. Again and again she had told him so. Again and again he had whinnied and returned to the charge. Now, as he was prancing at her again, Mike Vulper looked in.

In the doorway, his figure showed straight and supple, but his face was sinister. It suggested a mask clapped there by nature in derision. Quasimodo must have had just such another. He was hideous.

Many are without suspecting it, but he had no illusions. Formerly felons were branded on the face; like their chains, it was part of the penalty. And it may be that, because of some forgotten sin committed in an unremembered life, this mask was his punishment. Otherwise he was free⁠—apparently, that is, for actually he was chained. Hoops stronger than steel bound him to Camille. He loved her. Fancy a worm in love with a star! But fancy, too, common sense on the part of the worm, and the latter will know that the star is out of reach. Mike needed no one to tell him that. A mirror can be very instructive.

Now, as he entered the room, Glendenning turned, scowled, and, precisely as if he were eating ice, addressed him.

“And how is my cousin today?”

In the same voice, in the same tone, in the same manner, with a power of mimicry that was disconcerting, instantly Mike repeated the question. It was as if Glendenning had asked it twice.

Camille laughed and showed her teeth, which were well worth showing.

“Mike, you ought to be on the stage.”

Glendenning’s scowl deepened.

“Yes, as Romeo.”

Without heat, Mike took it up.

“Perhaps I may. I may surprise you yet, Glendenning.”

As he spoke, he moved to the girl, dropped his voice, whispered at her.

At that Glendenning fairly neighed.

“Ha! It won’t be with your manners, then! Good night, Camille.”

Camille nodded and turned to Mike. When they had both been younger, his face had frightened her. Latterly she had become accustomed to it as one does become accustomed to anything. In the interim, she had been in Europe, and he in this country. It was only since the war that they had been under this roof, which belonged to his father, her guardian.

“I wish you were blind,” he told her, when Glendenning had gone. “If you were, you would marry me. As it is, I’m off.”

Camille, who had been standing, sat down.

“Where to, Mike?”

From a pocket, he took a paper and, in taking it, took also another, which fell at her feet. The first, which was partially engraved, had on it particulars concerning him; also his photograph. He displayed it.

“This is a passport. With it, I had intended to go to France and join the Foreign Legion. But yesterday my father changed his mind about something, and since then I have changed mine.” He stooped and recovered the fallen paper, at which, as he did so, she looked.

“What is that? A Medical Record? Mike! You’re not going to be a physician, are you? A physician in the family is so reassuring. Just like a fire escape.”

He shook his head.

“That’s just a thing I happened on in Dix’s office. He wants it back. No, I’m going away to join a friend of mine.”

“Who? What is his name?”

For a second he hesitated.

“Victor Revell.”

The girl considered him.

“I never heard you speak of him before.”

Mike fumbled in his waistcoat.

“You never heard me speak of anything but you, Camille. You won’t any more. Now, before I go, will you do me a favor?”

“A dozen.”

Into her hand he put a silver coin, at which she stared and exclaimed:

“Why, it’s a five-franc piece! What in the world⁠—”

Mike nodded at her.

“It’s what gamblers call a luck piece. I want you to keep it for me. Promise that you will.”

“I promise. But you must do something for me. You must write.”

He took her hand.

“I have every intention of doing so. May I kiss you goodbye?”

She nodded, but she closed her eyes. When she opened them, he was in the hall.

In the hall was the stair. He went on and up. At the top was darkness. It engulfed him.

In this life, Camille was never to see his face again⁠—except once, long later, when she thought she did. Yet in that, as will appear, she was perhaps mistaken.

II

Camille got up and looked at the clock, which marked seven. Usually at that hour she dined, having dressed beforehand. But on this evening, after returning from a run with a chum, Kate Delafield, she had been waylaid by the cook, then by Glendenning, finally by Mike, and she had had no time to change.

She was none the less hungry and she went back into the dining room, which, situated in an extension, was in a measure separated from the rest of the house. There the lights were on, the table was set. On a sideboard was bread, fruit, a salad, a decanter of claret, a brace of cold partridges; also, an evening paper.

Camille rang and took up the paper, which told of the misery that is the garment of Europe and of the gayety that is the parure of New York. The moderate irony of it missed her. But then one gets satiated with horrors, and, telling herself she was glad that Mike had changed his mind about going abroad, she rang again.

Then, as no one came, she put the food on the table, sat down, and began to eat. The partridge was good, and though, ordinarily, she would have preferred something hot, she was too hungry to care. The salad, too, might have been worse⁠—and better, for in the preparation of the dressing, there had been a noticeable absence of brains. But that, too, she let pass and, while eating it, wondered whether Mr. Vulper was coming down and, in that case, whether he would have more to tell her about Shri.

That creature interested her enormously. She did not in the least believe in him, but the things he did, or was credited with doing, delighted her. He could be in two places at once, and if you happened on him where he had no business to be⁠—in, for instance, Mr. Vulper’s study at the head of the stairs⁠—he would break like a bubble and vanish.

Gymnastics of that high order appealed to her as unsurpassed by anything she had ever read.

“But how can he be so wickedly lovely?” she had at dinner, only the day before, asked of Mr. Vulper, who had referred her to his Sutras of Patanjali⁠—which, when she had first heard of them, she had thought must be something from the chemists, but which, she had since become skeptically aware, taught of union with the supersensible; taught of the supernormal powers which that union confers; taught, too, how the advanced pupil may exteriorize himself from the body, project himself through space, materialize partially or wholly, appear and disappear at will.

“But why should this duck of a darling want to play flying trapese with himself like that?” she had also asked, and had been told that among the apes and peacocks of the apricot temples at Benares, there are priests whose duty it is to guard the arcana of their immemorial lore.

“Such things,” the old man continued, “are not for everybody⁠—at all events not for nobodies who talk about nothing⁠—yet, while they can be safely divulged to scholars, it is just that that Shri is trying to prevent. Well, my dear, perhaps he may, perhaps he may,” Vulper, with philosophic fatalism, had added.

Camille, at the time, had decided that he was as mad as a hatter, as mad as two hatters, as mad as Lincoln and Bennett, but none the less the most adorable old dear in the world. And now, as she hacked at one of the partridges, she wondered whether he would be coming down with more tales of Shri’s high jinks.

Behind her something moved. She half turned and, catching a side view of Archibald, exclaimed at him:

“I rang and rang! This salad is⁠—”

“Beg pardon, mem. Mr. Mike wanted a taxi, and just now I had to let Doctor Dix in. Would you wish some soup, mem? There’s a filet of sole and⁠—”

“For Heaven’s sake! I can’t eat backward! Get me some coffee. Isn’t Mr. Vulper coming down?”

“I’ll see, mem.”

He turned and went, and the girl took up again the paper, in which she found a fashion article that, like the salad, lacked brains. Before she had finished, Archibald was again behind her.

“Well?” she asked, without looking up.

After a moment, getting no other answer than the inarticulate sound that some people make when eating, she turned and saw that the servant looked like a ghost with a stomachache. Quite white, he was opening and closing his mouth. Calmly she surveyed him.

“What is the matter with you?”

Archibald swallowed.

“It’s Mr. Vulper, mem.”

“Well, what about him?”

He swallowed again.

“Oh, mem, I don’t rightly know. But Doctor Dix, he⁠—”

Camille was on her feet so quickly that she overturned the chair. She ran through the drawing room, out into the hall, and up the stairs to the study at the head of them. There, in a chair, one arm pendant, his head hanging over it, the old man lay. Bending over him was Dix. As Camille entered, the physician straightened, looked at her.

“Cardiac paralysis,” he announced.

Camille’s hands had gone to her throat. In her riding costume, she always looked like a handsome boy. Now she looked like a thoroughly frightened one. From her eyes two round tears leaped like beads. Ever since she could remember, the dead man had been good to her. Though no relative whatever, he had been father and mother to this girl who now, in all the world, had no one⁠—except a trust company, which is without a soul.

A sense of desolation, immense, unescapable, swept over her. She had so taken him for granted! The fact that he was old had never troubled her. It was natural for him to be old. She could not remember that he had ever been anything else. And now he had gone. The memory of little negligences to him came and hurt her. But behind it, behind everything, was the consciousness, selfish, yet human, that she was alone.

Dix, who had moved from the chair to the table and who had in his hand a paper, was talking at her, though about what she did not know. But gradually she realized that what he was saying concerned a will. As if she cared! But he was showing it to her⁠—a sheet of paper, torn in two, half covered with the dead man’s writing, across which was crawled, “Shri Shankira.”

Utterly unstrung, at sight of that, for a second she stared, then she screamed.

For that one second, before her had passed a vision of apes, of peacocks, of apricot temples, and of some priest of Siva, recovering there from a catalepsy, self-induced, during which his entity, exteriorized, had crossed the seas, gibbered at Vulper, and⁠—

It was then that she screamed.

“He killed him?”

Dix, tossing the paper aside, turned sharply to her.

“What do you mean?”

But now, though still unstrung, the girl’s common sense was asserting itself.

“I thought you meant that Shri had done it.”

“I meant nothing of the kind,” Dix impatiently retorted. “This Shri business he wrote himself. Only an hour ago, I warned him, and for the twentieth time, that at his age chloral was fatal. It was that that did it. I can’t be sorry enough. Apart from which, he had intended to leave you everything. Now it will all go to Mike, and you’ll be put in the street. Where is Mike?”

“Mike? He’s gone.”

Dix, moving from the table, looked in at the open safe, looked closer, fumbled it with his eyes, plucked at his beard, and turned.

“There was a pile of money there and a package. They’ve disappeared.”

That disappearance he momentarily considered. Then he dismissed it.

“Bah! He may have thrown them out of the window. He was quite capable of it.”

But there were other things to be attended to, and, seeing that the girl, for the time being at least, was totally unstrung, he went back to the table and rang.

III

“Don’t say you won’t change your mind,” Glendenning, with his equine air, was protesting at Camille, whose being put into the street was, of course, entirely figurative.

After the funeral and the rush of reporters who, from the inexperienced girl, had pulled more than they had expected⁠—the will unsigned and destroyed, the sudden demise, the missing manuscript, the missing money, the missing heir, out of all of which they made very good copy⁠—after that, the public administrator had stepped in, and notices had appeared announcing that “the People of the State of New York, by the grace of God free and independent, sent greeting to Michael Vulper, whose residence could not, after diligent inquiry, be ascertained, and citing him” and so forth and so forth.

But the greeting of the free and independent people had been ignored; so also had the citation. On the verbiage of both, Mike had appeared to be obscurely, but disdainfully turning his back. Yet, everything being possible, it may have been that neither had reached him; precisely as it may also have been that he was otherwise engaged.

Meanwhile, around the corner, on Riverside Drive, Camille had taken an apartment, furnished it after a fashion of her own, which was partly New York and partly Peking, put herself and the servants into it, and later had gone with Kate Delafield to Aiken.

There various young men had said the same thing to her. But as, from long practice, they had one and all acquired the art of making any subject uninteresting, their conversation had not affected her heart, her dreams, her golf, her runs, or her return. It had been January when she had gone South. Now it was April.

“No,” Glendenning repeated. “Don’t say it. Changing the mind is cleanly and therefore hygienic. My departed uncle had a room that he used for no other purpose.”

Camille, seated in a hand-painted chair, looked out at the moon and at the river, then at the Chinese lamps, at the draped and grand piano, at the portieres, on which silver dragons roamed, and finally at this superior young man, who was also seated.

Between her chair and his, there was a space, which mentally she surveyed. It amounted, she judged, to about thirty-six inches. But in those inches there were miles, thousands of them. If he had been talking from a kloof of inner Africa, he could not have been farther away.

None the less, he represented to her that curious thing which is called a link. He connected her with the past, with the old man whom she had loved, with his son, whom she had liked. And, moreover, he and she now had⁠—at any rate, he claimed that they had⁠—interests in common; interests, that is, in the final disposition of the decedent’s estate, concerning which he had long since retained a fat shyster named Tatum, to whom he negligently referred as his counsel.

“You don’t, perhaps, care for me yet⁠—” he was saying.

“And that,” Camille wickedly cut in, “is such an advantage. I could have no disillusions.”

“On the other hand,” Glendenning, smoothing his white tie, continued, “you know that I do care for you.”

Camille laughed.

“You are so persuasive! Poor Mike wasn’t in it with you.”

“Why poor? He has only to show up to step into a fortune,” retorted Glendenning, who earnestly hoped that Mike would do nothing of the kind; for, if he omitted to, then, after the legal delays, that fortune he, as next of kin, would inherit.

Camille looked down at a floor pillow at her feet, kicked it aside, stood up, and made a pass with her hands.

“I can’t account for it, and the fact that I can’t torments me. It seems as if it were my fault. When he said he was going away, I should have made him say where. Instead of which, I asked him to write. He never has. Yet he must be somewhere.”

Glendenning nodded.

“In the fourth dimension.”

Camille turned on him.

“I’ll thank you not to jest on a subject that to Mr. Vulper was an article of faith!”

With entire ease, Glendenning tacked.

“Excuse me. I meant in the grave, for there he is, unless”⁠—“he is in prison,” he was about to add, but instead he said⁠—“unless he went blind.” Again Camille turned on him.

“I must be blind, too. I don’t see what you are driving at.”

“Then I’ll tell you. The death of the author of a book of commentaries on the sutras of⁠—of some jellyfish of a Hindu spook; the death of an occultist who had devoted twenty years of his life to a manuscript which departed when he did; the death of a recluse who for no obvious reason inherited half of your father’s estate⁠—the death of an individual so unusual does not take place without comment. For forty-eight hours afterward, the papers dripped with his name, with the missing money, the missing manuscript, the missing heir. Mike must have read of it, unless, as I say, he went blind. Even so, unless in going blind he went deaf, there must have been others to tell him. But all that is preposterous. There is a fortune awaiting him. Why doesn’t he come and claim it?”

Camille yawned and sat down.

“I wish you would tell me.”

Glendenning pulled at his cuff.

“Perhaps I can. But you know that, in spite of Mike’s very unfortunate appearance, you had rather a tender feeling for him.”

Impatiently the girl took it up.

“What of it? And anyway I had no more intention of marrying him than I have of marrying you.”

Glendenning gulped, swallowed, and corrected it.

“No more immediate intention, you mean. But now will that tender heart of yours prevent you from considering certain facts?”

“Dear me,” thought Camille, “I wish he would go!”

But she said:

“Well, what are they?”

Glendenning raised a hand, the fingers extended.

“I’ll show you. On the night my uncle died, Mike said goodbye to you, went upstairs, sent Archibald for a taxi, and left the house. That is a fact, is it not?”

Camille nodded.

“Previously Dix had been with my uncle, who then was in his usual health. Dix was called away. Mike had hardly gone when Dix returned and found my uncle dead. There you have another fact. And here is one more⁠—in the will that my uncle intended to execute, Mike was cut off.”

“And so were you.”

“No matter about that. To go back to Dix. My uncle sent for him to witness this will, and while they were discussing it, he showed him his manuscript and a pot of money.”

“But⁠—”

“Then Dix was called away. When he returned, my uncle was dead and the money and the manuscript had vanished. You admit that, don’t you?”

“Yes, the manuscript was certainly missing, and Dix said some money was, also. But, like Mike, they may turn up yet.”

“Together?”

“How do you mean?”

“The three of them⁠—the money, the manuscript, and Mike. There’s no other way out of it. They all departed at the same moment. If they did not, long since Mike would have returned. Now he can’t return. He’s afraid to.”

Impatiently Camille shrugged a shoulder.

“I don’t know whether to be angry or amused.”

“At what?”

“Why, you’re insinuating that he killed his father.”

“No, Camille, nothing of the kind. I’m merely submitting certain facts and asking you and myself what they amount to.”

“And I’ll tell you⁠—rubbish!”

“Well, let’s look at it this way. On the night my uncle died, I was with you in the drawing room. Mike appeared. Where had he come from?”

“I’m sure I don’t know.”

“Nor I. But I can imagine. I can imagine that he had a scene with his father, that he tried to force him to make the will in his favor, and, failing, grabbed the money and the manuscript, stuffed them into his grip, and came down to you, not realizing then what had happened, not realizing that he was a parricide, that in the struggle he had throttled his father or otherwise done him to death. The realization of that came later. But, at the time, don’t you remember how evil and sinister he looked?”

“I remember nothing of the sort. But if you can imagine all that, why can’t you imagine that since he left here, he has lost his memory? People often do, don’t they, and turn up as milkmaids or shoemakers somewhere else? Or if that is too much for you, why can’t you imagine that it was Shri who did it, provided, that is, that anything was done at all. Personally I prefer to think so.”

“It’s very morbid of you, then.”

“I suppose you’ll say that stupidity is preferable. Mike never killed his father; he never took the money; and what would he do with the manuscript? But if you can cook up a cock-and-bull story of that order, you’d far better try your hand on Shri. Why, your uncle kept me in fits of laughter over him. He was as real to him as I was myself.”

“My uncle was a fit subject for Bedlam. He⁠—”

“See here, Arthur,” Camille interrupted, “I won’t have you speak of him in that manner. And in my presence I’ll thank you never again to speak as you have of Mike. Your uncle was an angel to me, and as for Mike, I’d like to know when these amiable suspicions concerning him occurred to you?”

“From the start. The reporters all had them and practically said as much.”

“Then hereafter you⁠—”

Camille paused and turned. Through parting portieres, Archibald, a tray in his hand, was emerging. On the tray was a card and a letter, which he brought her.

Camille, glancing at the writing on the envelope, cried:

“Why, it’s from Mike!”

In the old melodramas, when the villain was foiled, he showed it; it was part of the business. Glendenning showed no emotion whatever, but figuratively his heart sank. His uncle’s money had been so neighborly. Now, like Shri⁠—and as suddenly⁠—it had gone.

“What does the dear boy say?” he at last got out.

Camille, who meanwhile had read the letter, handed it to him and looked at Archibald.

“Is anyone waiting?”

“A gentleman, mem.”

“Show him in.”

Hotel St. Francis, San Francisco, 10th November.

Dear Camille: Some day or other, this will be brought to you by my friend, Victor Revell. Smile on him for my sake and for his own. He is worth it.

At a glance, Glendenning took it in and, for further examination, he pocketed it.

Camille did not notice. She was greeting a man whom from that instant Glendenning hated, hated instinctively, hated intensely, hated without knowing why; which is the surest reason anyone can have for hating anybody.

“Mr. Revell?” Camille, a hand outstretched, was saying.

She had got up. Glendenning, too, had risen.

Revell took the hand, released it, nodded at Glendenning, whom Camille then introduced, smiled into her eyes, and answered her.

“Yes, and I fervently hope that my name may not be one of ill omen.”

“He is too good looking,” thought Camille, taken at once with his appearance, which was radiant, virile, and noble.

Seating herself and indicating a chair, she asked:

“And are you just here from San Francisco?”

“Practically,” Revell, seating himself also, replied. “It was a little while, though, before I could get your address. Doctor Dix, to whom Mike also gave me a line, told it to me. Mike could not have known where you were.”

“Yes?” Glendenning, who had remained standing, got in. “How is the dear boy?”

Revell looked up at him and from him to Camille.

“I am sorry to bring you bad news.” He paused, half raised a hand, and added: “It was pneumonia.”

At that, Glendenning sat down, flopped, rather. If he had been alone, he would have danced and shouted. As it was, he closed his eyes. It was all too blissful. The estate was his.

With a look in which there was pain, amazement, and uncertainty, Camille exclaimed:

“He is dead?”

Sympathetically Revell considered the girl.

“That depends on how you look at it. From what he told me of his father’s views, it may be that there is no such thing as death. It may that death is but a garage at which you wait a while until, in exchange for your demolished motor, destiny supplies you with a fresh one.”

“What an ass!” thought Glendenning.

But he said:

“Were you with poor Mike when⁠—er⁠—”

“Yes, I and a physician who certified accordingly. Towers his name is. I gave his address to Doctor Dix and also some papers that Mike wanted to go to him.”

Glendenning twisted. Into the core of his being the reply cut like a knife. Before him the inhuman possibility surged that Mike had made a will. He blurted it.

“Papers? What were they?”

With entire civility, Revell answered:

“Papers concerning Doctor Dix, I suppose.”

He turned again to Camille, who in the interval had gone to the window and was looking from it, but not at the moon nor yet at the river. She could not see them; her eyes were too blurred. Revell got up and joined her.

Glendenning, considering them both, also got up, passed through the portieres, closed the door, and went to the vestibule, where presently he was talking to Dix over the wire.

“This is Glendenning. I’m speaking from Miss Marcy’s apartment. A Mr. Revell who is here has just told us about poor Mike. Camille and I are very much cut up over it. Now this Mr. Revell says he left some papers with you. In Camille’s behalf, will you tell me whether they concern her?”

Clearly the answer came:

“Not in the least.”

“Well, you can appreciate that she is deeply interested. If there is no objection, will you tell me what they are?”

“No objection at all. One is a death certificate; the other a will of which I am appointed executor.”

Glendenning’s throat went dry and he coughed.

“What is its tenor?”

“Everything to Revell.”

“What?”

“Everything Mike possessed he left absolutely to Victor Revell.”

Ragingly Glendenning clutched at the instrument.

“I’ll contest it!” he thought.

But he said:

“May I run in and look at it?”

For a second the answer delayed. Then it came:

“Yes, but it won’t do you a bit of good.”

“I’ll come, all the same,” said Glendenning, who swore, grabbed at his hat, and started.

IV

From mingling faces; from forms and features that appeared, disappeared, reappeared; from these and from tumults of farewells, Camille awoke.

Through the open window, she could see the sky, an unprecised gray that hesitantly would become blue, bluer, still bluer. As yet it was gray. It must be very early, she thought. Then at once she remembered. Mike was dead.

The fact stood out and hurt her. Over it, the night before, she had cried a little. Now again her eyes were wet.

During his mysterious absence, she had missed him, though not poignantly nor yet impatiently, for she had felt that he must return. Now he never could, and when he had been with her, she had treated him like a dog that is overattentive and therefore in the way. She wished that she had been less hard with him. His appearance had been distressing, but custom had so familiarized her with it that she had accepted it, as one may get to accept a rhinoceros in the back yard, provided the brute is there long enough.

She dried her eyes and, in a sort of retrograde vision, reviewed the incidents of the night before⁠—Glendenning’s effort to show that if Mike were not a criminal, he would have returned; then the news of his death, the eclipse of Glendenning, and the brief afterwhile, during which she had learned from Revell what little there was to know.

That little, now that she reviewed it, seemed, like the sky, unprecised. Like the sky, there were voids in it, great stretches of nothing over which silence was spread. But then, in ten minutes, who can be exhaustive? And had there been as many as ten? Five, perhaps; six at most. Yet, during them, she had realized that, in addition to the appearance of this man, who looked as if he had stepped from a canvas signed “Murillo”⁠—some canvas that pictured a young grandee⁠—she realized that, in addition to this, which in itself is surely a lot, she liked the man himself. With the stranger, she had felt at home. This man, whom she had never seen before, had made her want to see him again. It was very extraordinary.

Love at first sight always is. Of the presence of that psychosis she was unaware. If she had been and had been cross-questioned regarding it, she certainly would not have blushed herself to death, but quite as certainly she would have lied. She had no Victorian ideals, but she knew what is nice and what is not and that, perhaps, is better.

Meanwhile, the sky had deepened. Through the window came the radiance of the April day. Later, when, in breeches and boots, she had breakfasted and was about to go for a run, Glendenning was announced.

Camille made a face. But, accepting the situation, she went into the drawing room where he stood, and where, for a superior young man, he looked very ugly.

“See here, Camille,” he at once threw at her. “Did that chap tell you how he did for Mike?”

Camille flicked with her crop at her boots.

“What chap?”

“Don’t beat about the bush. You know perfectly well that I mean Revell.”

“Oh,” said Camille slowly. “Mr. Revell, is it? Well, no, he didn’t say anything at all about himself⁠—which is more than I can say for some people.”

Glendenning caught it and tossed it back.

“Some people, at least, are honest.”

Camille twirled her crop.

“Last night Mike was an outlaw. Now I suppose Mr. Revell is a cutthroat. Why, what is the matter with you, Arthur?”

Glendenning snorted.

“Matter? Matter enough! The matter is that we have got to fight him. He told you, didn’t he?”

“About fighting him? Certainly not, and if he had, I should have understood as little as I understand you.”

“What I mean is, didn’t he tell you about Mike’s will?”

“Not a word. Why should he?”

“Because Mike has left him everything. Everything, do you hear that? He has left him property that he had no right to leave him, property that my uncle intended for you. But he was blackmailed into doing it. That is the size of it.”

In the little tempest of words, Camille sat down. It was certainly very queer, she thought, and she said so.

“Queer?” Glendenning chokingly repeated. “Queer is not the word for it. It’s undue influence⁠—felony, for all we know, State’s prison⁠—”

Camille laughed. She could not help it.

“Why not the chair? But nobody ever intended to leave the money to you. What are you so hot about?”

“What?” In righteous indignation, Glendenning lifted his arms. “You ask me that? Can’t you see that it is on your account? Do you suppose I shall stand by and see you bunkoed? Not a bit of it! I’ll have the will set aside!”

“Yes?” said the girl with a treacherously innocent air. “And what would happen then?”

“We would share and share alike. I’d give you half.”

Camille cocked an eye.

“Give me?”

“Well, you see, as next of kin, it would have to pass through my hands.”

Then, at sight of the mocking eye, he extracted and flourished a handkerchief.

“But,” he resumed, “it would all be in the family. When we are married⁠—”

“When we are!” Camille interrupted. “I have no intention of marrying you, not the faintest. And do stop waving that flag at me! I’m not a submarine. And how do you make out that Mike was blackmailed, as you call it?”

“Well, isn’t it obvious? Why, a schoolboy could reconstruct the whole thing! There was poor Mike, a stranger in a strange land. He was probably ill, in any event lonely, and certainly conscience-stricken. Then this Revell happened along, pretended to be hail-fellow-well-met, wormed himself into Mike’s confidence, plied him with drink, got him in his cups, wheedled out of him what happened the night his father died, and then threatened to expose him unless he left him everything. It’s as clear as day. I’ve seen the will. Dix showed it to me. It was executed in November in San Francisco and⁠—”

“But Mike could have made another, couldn’t he?”

“Certainly he could, and how do we know that he did not? Even otherwise, what was Revell to him? What was he, anyway, in comparison to you or to me?”

“Oh, come now! You know perfectly well that Mike hated you and that you hated him.”

Glendenning waved it away.

“I wouldn’t go as far as that. Mike was after you and so was I. There was just the spirit of decent rivalry between us. But that’s neither here nor there. The point is that we’ve got to have the will set aside. We’ve got to contest it. We⁠—”

“For Heaven’s sake! Do stop saying ‘oui’ all the time! Anyone would think you were a Frenchman.”

“I don’t understand,” said Glendenning, who had got the jest and did not like it.

Camille sprang up.

“Nor I. If it’s not French that you’re talking, it’s lunacy. I don’t believe a word of what you told me of Mike or a thing of what you say of Mr. Revell. Not one! What’s more, I won’t listen to another. You can see me down if you like. I’m off for a run.”

Glendenning could only comply. He saw her down; saw her hop on her horse; saw her start and trot away.

Immediately he decided on a run of his own, and presently, in the neighborly subway, he was being whirled down to the offices of his counsel, Tatum.

Mr. Tatum was a large, fierce man who looked like a chucker-out, but whose voice⁠—which was that of a prima donna⁠—contrasted almost tragically with the aggressiveness of his appearance.

“And so,” he purred, when Glendenning had summarized the matter, “you want to fight. That is the proper spirit. But we have no evidence. We have only suppositions. What your cousin may have done or omitted to do on the night of which you tell me is now immaterial. But that his beneficiary unduly influenced him we will have to show. Meanwhile, through my San Francisco correspondents, I can make an inquiry or two. Should these lead to anything, it may be worth while to proceed, if only with a view to a possible compromise, unless in the interim the will should prove voidable per se. As soon as it is entered, I will consider that point. But otherwise⁠—”

Tatum paused, looked at the walls wainscoted with yellow-backed books, looked beyond them at an idea that beckoned, nodded at it, and looked again at Glendenning.

“Have you anything in your cousin’s handwriting?”

“Yes, there’s that letter from him that Revell brought last night to Miss Marcy.”

“Have you anything else?”

“Well, I wrote him once asking him to advance me some money, and he answered very brutally that he would not.”

“Very good. Send both to me. It will be interesting to compare them⁠—to compare them, also, with the signature on the will. That, too, may lead to something. But otherwise we shall need evidence.”

“And we’ll get it,” Glendenning assured him.

And they did. But the evidence they landed was quite different from what they had expected. It belonged to quite another kettle of fish.

V

Camille rode up the river and raced back. The day before, she had done the same. The day before, the run had brought her the animal joy of living. But on this morning, the wind, the light, the breath of spring, the smell of lilacs, the fiery little cob, the eager glitter of the sky⁠—these things flushed her, reddened her lips, brightened her eyes, poured claret into the cream of her skin, powdered her face with dust, wilted her collar, made her hot and dirty, but not happy. The death of Mike oppressed her, and on that oppression had been superimposed Glendenning’s utter obnoxiousness. The manner in which he had spoken of Revell had angered her, and in spite of the run, the memory of it rankled. None the less, as she told herself, it was queer about the will.

At the curb, a groom bobbed at her. She hopped off, patted the cob’s wet nose, looked into his great and empty eyes, fed sugar into his dripping and ready mouth, flew in, flew up, tubbed, changed, and wished that she were a man and could hit out and swear.

But now Margaret, a maid, pale and plain, looked in with an announcement and a query. Luncheon was served, and would she see Mr. Revell?

Would she? Well, yes, since he was there, she supposed so, and she looked in the glass, dabbed her face with cologne, patted her hair, patted her frock, wondered what he wanted, and went on and into the drawing room.

Revell was seated. As she entered, he got up and she thought him even better looking than he had appeared on the previous evening. But at the moment, she got, too, another impression, and she out with it.

“I’ve seen you before. Where?”

Revell, with a movement of the hand, just sketched a gesture.

“In the street, perhaps. In the theater. I used to live here.”

Camille shook her docked hair.

“Yes, I know. I’ve heard Mike speak of you. But could it have been in Europe?”

“Perhaps. But isn’t it rather unimportant?”

“I don’t know. Mike’s father used to say that nothing is unimportant⁠—or was it that everything is? There! I’ve got it. I remember now. In the Louvre! Yes, the portrait of⁠—I’ve forgotten whom. But I remember the picture distinctly⁠—a man dressed for a fancy ball. You’re not dressed that way, but you look just like him. Now will you have luncheon with me? In fact, you’ll have to. I hear you are head of the house, such as it is, and I’m prepared to treat you with the greatest respect.”

“But, you see, I don’t want to be treated with respect, and moreover⁠—”

“And moreover luncheon is served. Will you come?”

She led the way. In the adjoining room, stood Archibald, at whom she motioned.

“A chair for Mr. Revell. Claret for Mr. Revell. The best there is for Mr. Revell, and all there is of it.”

“Yes, mem. Yes, mem,” Archibald got in, pottering about, pottering away.

“And moreover,” the young man resumed, when the old man had gone, “I am not the head of the house. I’m not even the foot of it. I’m not in it at all. But if, technically and for the moment, I seem to have a shadow of a claim⁠—”

“Let me give you some of this,” Camille interrupted.

“Thank you. If I have anything of the kind,” Revell continued, “that’s just the reason why I am here. I⁠—”

“And let me give you some of this, also,” Camille again interrupted.

“Thank you. If I have any sort of a claim, I’m here to resign it.”

“Eh?” Camille’s brilliant eyes were on him.

“Only, in coming, I did not expect⁠—”

“That I would know about Mike’s will already.”

“Precisely.”

Camille nodded.

“This morning Mike’s cousin, Mr. Glendenning, told me.”

“Ah!” Revell, who had been looking at Camille, looked down at his plate, on which was sweetbread and sorrel. At once he looked up. “I take it that he objects. That is only natural. If Mike had left no will, the money would have gone to him. Rather than that, Mike preferred to leave it to me and, rather than accept it, I resign it to you.”

If anyone can appear both pleased and indignant, that is the way Camille looked.

“Why, I never heard of such a thing! I couldn’t let you!”

Revell smiled at her.

“I knew that would be the first thing you would say, but⁠—”

“I shall say it first, last, and all the time. If you don’t like claret, there is some Chablis. Now, I don’t want to hear another word about it.”

“To return, then, to our Chablis Moutonne,” Revell, intent on holding his own, resumed. “Apart from Mike’s will, I have no claim or title to the property, which is triply yours. It is yours because it originally belonged to your father; it is yours because Mr. Vulper intended to leave it to you; it is yours because such was Mike’s wish.”

“But⁠—”

“Yes, I appreciate. You will ask why, in that case, is not the will in your favor? I don’t know that I can properly explain it.”

“I should think not.”

“I mean that I can’t explain it without the risk of offending you.”

“Oh, I am not the kaiser.”

“Well, then, if I did not offend you, I might offend others.”

“And I am not a repeater, either.”

“Here it is, then. Mike felt that if he left the money to you, Glendenning might contest it.”

“But can’t he anyway?”

“Certainly he can. Moreover, he probably will. But, apart from that, Mike felt that even if his cousin did not contest a will made in your favor, he would so badger you about it that you might end by giving the money to him.”

“How well Mike knew me!”

“Yes, and probably much better than he knew this cousin of his, in whom, no doubt, he was greatly mistaken.”

“Not a bit of it,” thought Camille.

But she said:

“You are not eating anything.”

Revell took a mouthful of sorrel and added:

“You can see, then, how it is. Pending the settlement of the estate, the court practically holds it in trust for you. But once the funds are turned over to me, I shall pay them in for you at your bankers.”

Camille straightened.

“I’ll tell them not to take it.”

“The bankers who won’t take money do not exist.”

Camille frowned.

“I’ll refuse to touch it.”

“Then it will accumulate interest for you until you change your mind.”

“But you’re bullying me! Suppose I never change my mind?”

“Then you’re not a woman. But assuming that you are as consistent as all that, the property will go to your heirs.”

Camille bridled.

“I haven’t any⁠—I never shall have any.”

“Then it will go to the State.”

Camille nodded.

“There, you see! You had far better keep it yourself.”

At that Revell laughed, and the laugh and the look that accompanied it annoyed the girl, who exclaimed:

“Are you very rich?”

Then he, too, nodded.

“Enormously.”

“What?” she exclaimed again.

“I am one of the richest men in the world,” Revell calmly replied and as calmly enumerated the rent rolls of his vast estate. “I have health, strength, youth, and a total absence of needs.”

“And extraordinary good looks,” thought Camille.

But she said:

“Mr. Rockefeller might envy you.”

Revell bowed.

“Whereas I am immodest enough not to envy anyone.”

“He’s a dear,” thought Camille.

But she said:

“I don’t wonder you want to throw money out of the window. It must be great fun. But it’s a game that two can play at. If you pay money in at my bank, I will pay it back at yours.”

“You’ll have a hard time finding it, Miss Marcy.”

“Why? Where is it?”

“Everywhere and nowhere.”

“That sounds spacious. What is its name?”

“The Bank of Hope.”

“Now isn’t he a duck?” thought Camille.

But she said:

“I see. You have ambitions.”

“Only one, but that is immense.”

Camille stood up.

“Is it a secret?”

Revell also stood up.

“Can you keep one?”

“Yes, yes.”

“So can I.”

“Why, isn’t he mean?” thought Camille.

But she said:

“You haven’t eaten a thing.”

As she spoke, she passed into the drawing room. Revell followed and took her hand.

“I’ve never had a better luncheon.” Releasing her hand, he asked: “May I come again?”

Promptly Camille dropped a curtsy.

“Señor Don Hidalgo, this house is yours.”

When, from the hall without, she had heard the door close, she went to the window, saw him as he reached the street, watched him as he moved away.

When he had rounded the corner, she sat at the piano, attacked a score of Borodine, abandoned him for Granados, and, in allusion no doubt to the latter, stayed her hands and, said aloud:

“I never dreamed that anyone could be so nice.”

As she spoke, she was conscious of someone entering the room and, turning, she saw Glendenning. The intrusion annoyed her, but of that she gave no sign.

Glendenning was less circumspect. Angrily he considered her.

“So you’ve been having that man to luncheon, have you?”

She stood up.

“Really, Arthur, when you address me, I’ll thank you to adopt another tone.”

“But, my dear Camille, when Archibald told me, I could hardly believe my ears. This morning I showed the feller up to you for the confidence man that he is, and my back is hardly turned before you are wining and dining him.”

“It seems to me that it is you who are doing the whining. And, anyway, you are entirely mistaken. Mr. Revell is a very rich man.”

“What?”

“And you can attack Mike’s will all you like. But it will be me, not Mr. Revell, whom you are attacking.”

Glendenning stood on one foot, then on the other.

“How? Why? What?”

“Yes. Mr. Revell proposes to turn the money over to me.”

At that, Glendenning threw up his arms and dropped into a chair.

Camille nodded at him.

“Anyone would think I had shot you. But don’t die just yet. I need not say that I can’t accept it.”

“But⁠—”

“There you are.”

In the surprise of it, Glendenning felt as if a blanket had been thrown over him; not a wet blanket or even an ordinary one, but the Oriental variety, silken, soft, smothersome. He struggled free.

“Yes, you’re right. I am there. It’s a plant. I’ll wager that he’s not a rich man at all. Though, to be sure, he looks like a lead in a movie. But no one would suppose that he could pull it over you like that. Can’t you see that, in offering to give you the estate, his only object is to hoodwink us into standing aside, while he laughs and pockets it? No, none of that! I’ll have a deed drawn conveying all his interest under Mike’s will to you. Then you ask him to sign it. Then you’ll see.”

Camille shrugged a shoulder.

“Perhaps you didn’t hear me. I told him, as I told you, that I could not and would not accept it.”

“And you’ll never get the chance⁠—unless it comes to you through me. What are you laughing at?”

“At you. What else? Mr. Revell said he was sure Mike must have misjudged you.”

Like a beast of prey, the exasperated Glendenning snarled:

“Yes, confound him! He’s one of the devils who speak well of everybody. The Judas!”

Camille bubbled.

“That, I suppose, is a jeu d’esprit. I might like some more, but I haven’t the time.”

Raveningly Glendenning jumped up.

“And that, I suppose, is a hint. Very good, I’ll go⁠—but I will return.”

“Not as you did just now,” thought Camille, who, when he had gone, rang for the servant.

“Archibald,” she told him, “I shall be sorry to lose you. But I don’t wish to have Mr. Glendenning or anyone else marching in here before you inquire whether or not I am at home. And I don’t wish Mr. Glendenning or anyone else to be told who has or has not been here.”

“Beg pardon, mem, but Mr. Glendenning, he asked⁠—”

“That will do, Archibald. You heard what I said.”

Camille went back to the piano. There, like a vision in a photo play, mentally, before her, stood Revell.

VI

Tatum, a fortnight later, looked up at Glendenning and in his mayonnaise voice inquired:

“Do you play golf?”

Glendenning, who had just entered the office, sat down.

“No, I loathe the stupid game.”

Tatum caressed his aggressive jaw.

“It’s fortunate that stupidity does not hurt. If it did, yelling would be continuous and New York is noisy enough already.”

Glendenning twisted.

“I thought you wanted to see me.”

“Yes,” Tatum replied, “and it’s just for that reason that I asked if you play golf. We seem to have run into a bunker.”

As the ogre purred, he took up a letter, glanced at it, put it down, and purred anew.

“My San Francisco correspondents write that your cousin registered at the Hotel St. Francis the evening of the ninth November, which is just five days after he left his father’s house. My correspondents say that the next morning he asked for a reputable attorney and was directed to the firm that attend to the hotel’s law business. According to my correspondents, he applied to this firm to have his will drawn, stating that he was in a hurry and wanted it at once. The will was then drawn for him; after which, he copied it out in his own hand, had his signature witnessed, settled with the firm, returned to the St. Francis, paid his bill, took his grip, and⁠—goodbye.”

Tatum looked again at the letter, refreshed his memory with it, and lit a cigar.

“Months later, or, to be exact, on the twenty-eighth of March, at four o’clock in the morning, he turned up at the Morrow House, where, on the following day, he died.”

Tatum wreathed himself in smoke and added:

“And that is the bunker that we are up to.”

Glendenning swore.

“Your correspondents say nothing else?”

“Plenty,” Tatum trilled. “They enter into all manner of irrelevant details. It appears that when Mike turned up at the Morrow House, he was accompanied by a man who paid his lodging in advance, saw him up to the room assigned, came down, and went away, but not until he had summoned a physician for your cousin, who badly needed one. The physician, Doctor Towers, diagnosed the case as pneumonia, to which alcoholism, complicated with exposure, had been contributory. Your cousin then was dying. What is it, Freddie?”

A clerk entered. Apparently young, he was quite bald.

“It’s Jerolomon about the St. Chrysostom Church matter⁠—”

Tatum puffed and murmured:

“Ask him to come again. Say that I am closeted with the cardinal now.”

When the clerk had gone, Tatum, in his prima-donna voice, asked:

“Where was I? Oh, yes! At noon, a man appeared who presumably was the man of the night before. In any event, he represented himself as a friend of your cousin’s, agreed to pay, and did pay, all the expenses, and later had the body removed to the morgue of a crematorium, where it was afterward incinerated. Meanwhile, your cousin’s identity had been properly established. Among his effects, was a passport on which was his photograph, or, at all events, a photograph; and that, together with his few other effects, this friend of his removed.”

Tatum again took up the letter, put it down once more, glared, and in his opera voice resumed:

“If I were younger, I would run out there. I hear that Frisco is a delightful place. But I hear also that the food en route is the reverse. Besides, there is the coming back. No, I couldn’t do it. But you might.”

For a moment, Glendenning considered it.

“I would if I thought I could nail that scoundrel.”

“Well,” Tatum affectionately replied, “if you conclude to, you’d best not put up at the Morrow House. It is not, I hear, a place for a gentleman. And that reminds me. What could have induced your cousin to go there? Why did he not go back to the St. Francis? Of course there is no law in the matter. He was free to do as he liked⁠—free to drink, free also to expose himself. When it rains in San Francisco, I hear that it is something to boast about. Your cousin appears to have been subjected to it. He appears, also, to have grown a beard. There is no law against that, either. But perhaps that is the reason why he did not return to the St. Francis. Perhaps he feared that he would not be recognized. Doctor Towers told my correspondents that he looked like a tramp. For the heir to a fortune, that is interesting, but not exceptional. In England, before the war, I saw a man who looked like a poacher and who turned out to be a duke.”

“What do your people say about this Doctor Towers?” Glendenning, biting a finger, moodily got in.

“Old established family practitioner with a thoroughly good reputation. Which also reminds me. This friend of your cousin’s in his last moments has no reputation at all. He has not even a doubtful past, though it’s probably better to have a doubtful past than a past about which there is no doubt whatever. But this deathbed friend has nothing of the kind. Who is he?”

“Revell,” Glendenning sullenly replied.

“Precisely. And who is Revell? In San Francisco no one ever heard of him. Your cousin⁠—yes. Your cousin stopped at hotels; he wrote letters; he visited lawyers. But of Revell there is not a trace, not one. Who is this man who seems to have sprung from nowhere and who owns the earth?”

“My cousin’s murderer.”

Airily Tatum waved it away.

“No, not that. The man in the Morrow House died of a perfectly defined disease, of which the predisposing causes were sufficiently indicated. The man in the Morrow House died a natural death. But your cousin did not. Or, at least, so far as we are yet aware. So far as we are yet aware, your cousin may enjoy the same good health that you do.”

Glendenning started.

“Then who was the man in the Morrow House?”

“It is to find out that that I spoke of going there. But, apart from the mysteries of the dining car, the crematorium tells no tales.”

“Then we’re dished.”

“No, not that, either. On the face of it, a Mike Vulper died at the Morrow House. But before the will is probated, it has got to be shown to my satisfaction that that Mike Vulper was your Mike Vulper. And even should that be proven, it must be proven, also, that it was your Mike Vulper, who, in the offices of the San Francisco attorneys, executed this will.”

Glendenning groped, but he could not get it.

“You think⁠—”

Tatum sat back.

“I don’t know what to think. When you first spoke of Revell, you said that he looked like a mummer. He may be one. In which case, he could certainly make himself up and pass for your cousin to people who would have no suspicions about him and who might at most be expected to vaguely describe him long after.”

“That’s it. That’s it.”

Tatum gestured and scowled.

“It may be. For, as you may remember, when the will was drawn, he copied it. Why did he? Such a proceeding was absolutely unnecessary and becomes all the more curious when you consider that he was in a hurry. Why, then, did he? The answer is obvious. He did it for no other reason than because he felt that his identity might be questioned and, possessing, in addition to other talents, the ability to imitate another’s writing, he wrote it in Mike’s hand, on which he had previously practiced.”

Savorously Glendenning gulped.

“Bravo! We’ve got him! The will is a forgery.”

“Yes,” Tatum purred at him, “that is the way I look at it. But even if we can prove that, as perhaps we may, then, before we can claim the property, we’ve got to prove also that your cousin is dead.”

“If he’s not dead, where is he?”

“Ask Revell.”

“By the Lord Harry, I will!”

“He knows, but he won’t tell you. He knows why the man in the offices of the San Francisco attorneys was in a hurry. He won’t tell that, either. He knows and he won’t tell why the body of the man in the Morrow House was burned. But I can tell. It was to cover his tracks.”

Glendenning’s face darkened.

“Then he’s got us again.”

Tatum laughed fatly.

“I don’t think so. If, as is possible⁠—and probable⁠—we can show that the will is a forgery, we can accept without question the evidence of your cousin’s death. In other words, Mike Vulper died at the Morrow House; he died intestate; and the estate is yours.”

“Tatum, that’s great!”

“Yes, and my bill is going to be greater,” thought the lawyer.

But he said:

“When do you think you will see this impostor?”

Glendenning sprang to his feet.

“Tonight, and⁠—confound him!⁠—I know where.”

Tatum looked up at him.

“Tonight I am going to ‘The Ring Around the Rosy’ show. Afterward, suppose you meet me at the Tap House. Meanwhile, don’t fail to ask Revell where your cousin is. He won’t tell you, but⁠—”

“Oh, I’ll jolt him all right,” answered Glendenning, who was leaving the room.

VII

That evening, Camille dined alone, or as much alone as a young woman can be who is served by a servant and whose mind is thoroughly occupied. Of Archibald, she was subconsciously aware that, always old, latterly he had seemed to be older. But Revell inhabited her thoughts. Since that high noon when he had lunched with her on a mouthful of sorrel, she had seen him every day. He had sat with her, walked with her, ridden with her, and, where a girl like Camille is concerned, few young men can do that without saying the same thing over and over again.

Revell had omitted even mentioning it. But there are always ways of telling, and Camille knew the state of his mind as well as she knew her own. She knew that she was head over heels in love with this man of whom she knew nothing. Yet, although she lacked the experience to recognize it, that very fact increased his attractiveness. In the history of love, the most sudden, surprising, and devastating passions have been inspired by people who had mystery for sole asset.

Revell had many another. He was very good looking and equally unassuming. In addition, he was distinctly well bred. He never talked about himself. When questioned, he switched. In spite of which, Camille felt at home with him; felt, as girls who have read Mrs. Besant sometimes do feel, that in anterior, forgotten, and enigmatic lives, they had met and loved before. For precisely as she had become conscious of her own psychosis, she was conscious of his. She knew that he loved her. He had made her feel that he meant the very thing he did not say. For the subtlety of that⁠—and subtle it certainly was⁠—she loved him all the more. But as she would have loved him anyway, it perhaps did not matter.

It mattered, and monumentally, to Glendenning, who, on several occasions, had succeeded in making himself even more obnoxious than usual. There was the defunct Mrs. Grundy, whom he evoked and flung at her. Living as she was, and, as he put it, without the ghost of a chaperon, such goings-on did not do. Besides, what did she know of Revell? Was she even sure that his name was Revell? Et cetera and so forth and so on.

To all of which Camille had turned an angry ear and on each occasion had turned him out. None the less, when there is mud enough, some of it will stick. It affected the girl. It made her realize that, on the subject of the one and only, she was considerably in the dark.

At the moment, she was not only in the dark; she was really alone. Archibald had vanished. A moment more and there he was again and would she see Mr. Revell?

Camille moistened her lips, went into the adjoining room, gave him her hand, and said:

“I was just thinking about you. Sit down and tell me all about yourself. It’s perfectly ridiculous. I don’t yet know what your middle name is.”

Revell, who was looking very fit, smiled as he answered:

“That must be because I haven’t any.”

But Camille was not to be denied. “Your middle name can stand for you, then. We’ve talked about me, or, rather, you have, and that topic is threadbare. We’ve talked gastronomy, and I’ve found that you know very little about it. We’ve talked art, and you’ve found that I know less. We’ve talked horses, war, submarines, aëroplanes, the czar, the kaiser, and the weather. Barring horses, I never want to talk of any of them again. I want to talk business. Who are you?”

Revell’s smile deepened.

“Didn’t somebody put the same question to Plato, and didn’t he answer: ‘I wish I knew?’ ”

“Oh, if you’re going to bring out your seventeen-inch guns! And, anyway, Plato probably found out. If you have not, I’ll help you. Your name is Victor Revell. You are nice, quiet, and gentlemanly. You were Mike’s friend, and now you are mine. I like you very much. But I know nothing of you.”

“You might not like me so well if you did.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, as somebody said, the soul of another is a dark place.”

Camille shook her head at him.

“I’m sure yours isn’t. I feel as if I had always known you. And yet, at the same time, I feel that I don’t know you at all.”

Revell looked down, then up.

“No one knows another. We seldom know ourselves. How can we? Life is a procession of phenomena, of which one departs as another appears and of which each, created by what has gone before, creates that which follows, the result being that, though from cradle to grave, a man is called the same, never, either mentally or physically, is he. The man of this instant perishes. He is replaced by a new one during the next.”

“Do you think that is a pretty way to talk to a girl?” Camille with an air of severity inquired. “Why don’t you tell me something I can’t understand. Or if that is difficult, treat me like a fellow of your own size and tell me some of your adventures. Don’t you want to smoke, Señor Don Hidalgo?”

Revell lit a cigarette, shifted, and answered:

“Adventures consist more in what we put in them than in what they contain. Of themselves, they are empty. It is our imagination that fills them. The only adventures worth having are those that come not from without, but from within. Take Napoleon. His existence was a dream from which he awoke at St. Helena. It was there only that he really lived.”

Camille made a face.

“There you go again! More artillery!”

“Well, then, take Mrs. Druce, take Madame Humbert.”

“I’m willing. Where are they?”

“Where they deserve to be⁠—among the immortals. With nothing more ponderable than a belief, perhaps justified, in human stupidity, Madame Humbert had herself recognized as the heiress of a plutocrat who never lived.”

“What?”

“Not only that, she evoked vanishing litigants, phantom millions, a grand phantasmagoria that included a safe full of government bonds, a safe in which those bonds were officially attested to be, a safe before which guards patrolled, a safe with which she rooked the world and the ghetto and which contained precisely one collar button and a penny. Where are the great prestidigitators after that? Where are Poe, Collins, Gaboriau, and Conan Doyle? Madame Humbert invented the most picturesque fairy tale of the age. It is true she had to cut and run for it, but genius is seldom appreciated.”

Camille made another face.

“I don’t like that story.”

Revell got up, put his cigarette in an ash receiver, nodded at the girl, and sat down.

“Then you may prefer the Druce poem. Considered as pure poetry, the Tichborne case is drivel beside it. In the latter, an Australian butcher caused an English gentlewoman to recognize him as her son. In the Druce case, the daughter-in-law of a London tradesman recognized a dead duke as the grandfather of her child. She did not stop there, either, though, unlike Madame Humbert, she did not have to run for it. Besides, what is a wicked woman who takes to flight by comparison with a wickeder duke who takes to trade? For that is what this lady claimed he did. She claimed that the Duke of Portland, after murdering his brother, transformed himself into a furniture dealer, had himself die and be buried, and, reappearing, frightened his shop folk into fits. Madame Humbert had a safe in which there was a new penny. Mrs. Druce had a coffin in which there was old iron. But both had imagination. Both understood intensive living. Together, they added to the gayety of nations and, incidentally, to mine.”

Camille moved uneasily.

“Perhaps you have intensive adventures of your own to relate.”

Revell covered her with his eyes.

“Not yet.”

“You mean that you’ll tell them later?”

“If I ever go to jail.”

The room was warm, but Camille shivered.

“That’s rather a gruesome possibility, isn’t it?”

“Inspirational, I should call it. When Bunyan was under lock and key, he enjoyed every kind of temptation and every variety of danger, with no other inconvenience than that of putting them all down in black and white. He was not a prisoner; he was a pilgrim. When Cervantes was jailed, the walls parted, and through them cavalcaded Sancho Panza, Don Quixote, and that great lady whose name is Fame. From a prison at Mons, Paul Verlaine issued with a sheaf of verse that carried him to Parnassus, carried him to the top. That’s the life! Life behind the bars!”

“Don’t!” she cried at him.

With real concern, he considered her.

“But I am only jesting.”

Camille shrank.

“Then your jests are horrible! You frighten me with them. I can’t bear to have you praise cheats and prisons. Particularly as⁠—”

“As what?” he asked, for visibly she hesitated.

“I can’t tell you. Yes, I will! I will tell you! Ever since you got here, Arthur Glendenning has said⁠—No, I can’t say it.”

But Revell helped her.

“That I am an impostor? Isn’t that it?”

“Yes,” the girl slowly got out. “But I don’t and won’t believe it.”

Revell moved over to where she sat.

“Camille, you know I love you.”

She looked up at him.

“And I love you. I love you absolutely.”

“Then trust me.”

“There’s something that you don’t want me to know?”

“Yes. For the present.”

“And when I do know it?”

“You shall be judge and jury.”

“But you are Victor Revell?”

“In flesh and blood.”

“And Mike was your friend?”

“That I can swear to.”

“And you’ve done nothing that you wouldn’t wish me to know?”

For a second, before him passed a flying picture torn from the long cinematograph of time. A second only and he answered at once:

“Nothing whatever.”

“Then you need tell me nothing else, except⁠—”

She hesitated and he repeated it:

“Except?”

“Except that you love me.”

He moved closer.

“I don’t need to tell you. You know it.”

“A girl likes to be told,” she smiled and replied. But the smile faded and she added: “Only I do wish that mysteries had not been made out of molehills. They give me the creeps.”

“You mean about Mike? But Mike is not a molehill. Though your Mr. Glendenning probably thinks I put him in one.”

“I don’t!” Camille hotly protested. “I never have! I never could!”

Revell laughed.

“But he does, and that is a trait of real genius. For it, he deserves a niche between Madame Humbert and Mrs. Druce.”

Camille turned from him. The portieres were parting. Through them Archibald appeared.

“Mr. Mike, mem, and will you see him?”

VIII

At the announcement, a whirlwind tossed her thoughts. Into them entered stretches of night. From Archibald, she turned to Revell. He had moved away. With an air of amused wonder, he was considering the servant. If, through the portieres, a giraffe had peered and spoken, he could not have seemed more pleasantly surprised.

Camille, turning again to the servant, agonizedly repeated:

“Mr. Mike?”

Archibald blinked.

“Mr. Mike, mem? I meant Mr. Glendenning.”

Camille, who had gasped and half risen, sighed and sank back and, not in relief, but in the abeyance of the shock, motioned that he was to come in.

Then, in a moment, as Glendenning appeared, affably Revell nodded.

“We were just talking about you.”

Icily Glendenning surveyed them both.

“You must have been very idle.”

“I could have screamed,” said Camille. “Did you hear Archibald announce you as Mike?”

Glendenning sat down.

“He’s crazy. Since my uncle died, he has not been the same at all.”

Camille, who had got her breath, replied:

“Mr. Revell says that no one is ever the same, that life is⁠—I’ve forgotten what, but that you are here one minute and gone the next.”

Glendenning looked over at Revell.

“You must have been referring to Mike. Personally, I would give a red pippin⁠—I would give two of them⁠—to know where he did go.”

Revell, who was standing with his back to the mantel, smiled pleasantly, but exasperatingly.

“If I can tell you anything, command me.”

Glendenning glared.

“You carry modesty to excess. Since he left here, no one knows anything at all about him but you.”

“Oh, I assure you, there are others in plenty. The people at the Morrow House, and more at the White River, good chaps with rough names⁠—Ootona, Keok, Adlooat, Iyatunk⁠—”

Camille moistened her lips.

“Who are these dears?”

Revell turned to her.

“I’ll introduce them properly. Before Mike left here, he intended to go to France; he had even obtained a passport. Meanwhile, I had written, outlining possibilities with which I was familiar and asking him to join me. He had made money at cards, more in Wall Street⁠—enough, at least, for a while⁠—and he started West. In San Francisco, he learned about his father and made a will⁠—though why in my favor is momentarily unimportant⁠—and went on and up to where I had told him he would find me, but where he contracted pleurisy and where, for medicine, there was only drink. The effect of both was such that I brought him back. When he reached San Francisco, he was dying, and at the Morrow House he died.”

To it all Camille listened with an air of such visibly absorbed interest that Glendenning, seeing that in drinking it in she was accepting it wholly, laughed.

“Where did this occur?”

Revell turned to him.

“On and about the White River.”

Glendenning grunted.

“I never heard of it.”

“No, possibly not. Before the war, you may not have known whether Verdun was in Poland or Peru. The White River is in Alaska. The climate did not agree with Mike, though it did agree with others who knew and liked him there⁠—with, for instance, Iyatunk, Adlooat, Keok, and Ootona.”

“Confound him!” thought Glendenning, who thought, too: “What evidence could be got out of these savages even if one could get at them?”

But he said:

“I infer that you are a prospector.”

“The meanest of us have our little talents,” Revell, in his agreeable way, replied. “I was applauding yours only a moment ago.”

“You quite turn my head,” Glendenning retorted. “But you would clarify it if you can tell me why Mike made his will in your favor.”

Camille flushed and motioned:

“Arthur, that is none of your business.”

“Forgive me, Camille. I have had to make it my business. Mr. Revell will not misunderstand my attitude, either. Mike knew that rightfully the property was yours. In spite of which, he turns it over to this gentleman, and frankly I don’t understand why.”

In that same pleasant way, Revell considered him.

“I follow you there. But don’t you think that there are mysteries that are better ignored than elucidated?”

It was a moment before Glendenning could unravel the remark, and when he did, he almost whinnied:

“Ha! Yes! If there were no lawyers to do so for us.”

“And have they succeeded?” Revell, with an air of eating nougat, inquired.

The thrust, keen and prompt as the point of a sword, pricked before it could be parried. From it Glendenning backed.

“May I ask you a question, Mr. Revell?”

“I am entirely at your service.”

Glendenning braced himself and straight at him threw it.

“Then where is Mike now?”

Camille sprang up. She was not red, but she saw it.

“Arthur, I am ashamed of you! Mr. Revell is my guest. I won’t permit him to be insulted!”

But Revell, who seemed perplexed, merely, and not insulted in the least, intervened.

“Mr. Glendenning has probably some good reason for asking that.”

“I should say so!” Glendenning exclaimed. “And with no reason to conceal it⁠—or anything else⁠—either.”

Camille stamped a foot.

“Then what is it?”

Glendenning twisted and fired:

“The fact that the Mike Vulper who died in San Francisco was not Mike at all.”

Camille went white. She stared at Revell, who was looking at something that she could not see⁠—a flying picture that showed dawn, drizzling rain, and the feverish and friendless derelict who, accosting him then, had begged for the love of God the price of a night’s lodging. A moment only. The picture faded. Revell was looking at Camille, who was staring at him.

From her he turned with a smile to Glendenning.

“You remind me of Hegel. Hegel propounded contradictory propositions. That is what you have done. It is very difficult. Let me applaud you for it.”

“He is swamping me with words,” thought Glendenning, who fired again:

“The man in the Morrow House was a tramp with a beard.”

Pleasantly, but indifferently, Revell nodded.

“There are no barbers on the White River. No tailors, either. Life there has its penalties.”

“And its rewards.”

“Undoubtedly, and you may share them if you care to go and join my friends there.”

“He has an answer for everything,” thought Glendenning.

But he said:

“What became of Mike’s effects?”

“Together with my own, they went down from an overturned canoe. When we reached civilization, we had only the rags we stood up in. The coat that Mike then wore I still have. In the inside pocket is a tag that reads ‘Johnson & Jordan, Fifth⁠—’ ”

“Avenue,” Camille cut in. Relieved and appeased, she had reseated herself. “I went with him there once when he was ordering a suit. He wanted me to select the material.”

“May I smoke?” Revell asked.

The girl nodded.

“Yes, and you, too, Arthur, if you want it. Only, for Heaven’s sake, let it be the pipe of peace.”

But Glendenning was on his feet.

“I’m off. Good night.” And he pranced himself out.

Camille turned with a smile to her lover.

“He acted like a wild boar, didn’t he?”

Revell approached her.

“No, not wild exactly. I should say that he has lucid intervals in which he is merely tedious.”

Then at once they were in each other’s arms.

IX

From Broadway’s blazing cereals, glittering corsets, coruscating gums, and fiery cats; from its pandemonium of lights, people, and bellowing motors, Glendenning entered the taproom where he was to meet Tatum.

He looked about, and not seeing his lawyer among the men there who were talking money in thousands, in hundred thousands, talking money noisily and talking nothing else, he seated himself at a table and ordered a whisky and soda.

When, with a pop, it was produced, he swore deeply, tossed it off, lit a cigar, and through the smoke of it turned the matter over, looked at it, as he had on the way down, from this angle, from that, from the other. Yet, however he viewed it, though it had the same fishy smell, the fish itself was invisible. It was there somewhere, but, try as he might, it escaped.

He swore again. Fate, in the shape of Revell, was slowly, but surely, dragging from him the two things that he wanted most in the world⁠—that girl and that money. But hope is forever saying “good morning” to you, and, the whisky prompting, he told himself that Revell had not got either of them yet⁠—and never would so long as his lungs held out and he could cry, “Stop thief!”

Only, to whom could he cry it? Not to Camille; she would not listen. Not to Revell; he would only laugh. But thank the Lord there still were the courts. Yet there, too, at the moment, he was stumped, for, barring the certainties of his own intuitions, he had not a thing to go on.

For him, those certainties were ample. They screamed at him. They shrieked the loose joints in Revell’s armor. They flaunted the fact, undeniable and beyond peradventure, that in the problematic event of Mike’s having made a will, it was in Camille’s favor that he would have made it. Therefore, he had but to show that the will was a forgery and that impostor would be jailed, the estate would be his, and, in the rebound, Camille also.

From that dream he started. Tatum, with his chucker-out air and prima-donna voice, was addressing him.

“Well, and did you do him?”

At a hovering waiter he murmured, “A high ball.” After which, he sat massively down and with a bulldog look listened while Glendenning recited the Alaskan epic.

The tale ended, Tatum drank and wiped his mouth.

“That was a very good show I saw tonight, but Revell must be a better one. Have you a match?”

Glendenning shoved him a box.

“Thanks. Have you a cigar also? Thanks again. As our friend probably knows, no law of God or man runs north of fifty-three. His Alaskan romance is, therefore, admirable. In it is the real artist’s surety of touch. It ought to be put to music. Of course, if I had him on the witness stand, I could run a limousine through it. But haven’t him there and I doubt now that I ever shall.”

“Why, today you⁠—”

“Yes, I know, and afterward I saw Marvalho. As an expert, he has no superior and but one equal, Bakharoff, who lives in Petrograd, unless he is dead at the front. Marvalho said that the writing in the will and in Mike’s letters is identical. He said that I could take it or leave it, but that all three were written by the same man.”

Tatum drank again and added:

“It’s a great pity.”

He meant it, too, but he was thinking of his bill.

“I had quite counted on landing the estate,” he continued. “But as this life is ordered, nothing is certain except what has already happened. None the less⁠—”

He paused, beat a brief tattoo on the table, nodded at Glendenning, and resumed.

“None the less, with the least adroitness, we ought still to grab the lion’s share. We have only to adopt toward Mike the same fiduciary position that Revell occupies and we will have turned the trick.”

Glendenning, who took it for granted that Tatum was drunk, groaned helplessly.

“Yes,” Tatum was saying, “it may be, as you once said, that Mike did for his father, and it may also be that Revell knows it. For the moment, however, all that is obscure and immaterial. But for some reason, Mike shuns the light of day. For some reason, he is hiding. For some reason, he covers his tracks, makes a will, and pretends to die, having previously arranged with his beneficiary to share the estate with him. But we can do any sharing as well as Revell, can’t we?”

Glendenning covered his mouth with a hand. Tatum, he saw, was not drunk, but was he mad?

“Of course we can,” Tatum, answering his own question, ran on. “Better, even. For Revell would certainly pocket it all; whereas we, as men of honor, would see to it that Mike received⁠—well, a third. Perhaps a trifle less. But we would do the square thing.”

“Tatum,” Glendenning got out, “what are you driving at?”

“The estate of course. What else? I want my share in it, too. And I’ll get it. For Mike did not die in San Francisco and, since he omitted to there, it’s even money that he omitted to entirely. We have only to find him and⁠—”

“Yes!” the exasperated Glendenning exclaimed. “But where?”

“Why, here in New York. I doubt if he ever left this sordid city.”

“But since Marvalho says that the will is in his writing, he must have made it out West.”

“Not in the least. He drew it here, signed it here, and shipped it to Revell, who, in affecting to recopy it, flimflammed the San Francisco lawyers with the original. These lawyers certainly did not reread it. Why should they? They merely had their clerks witness a paper which Revell pretended to sign. Anyway, if Mike was not here then, he is here now. Consequently, all we have to do is to find him, tell him that we will do as well by him as Revell, put on the thumbscrews, and there you are.”

Helplessly Glendenning looked into his empty glass. He could not see it and said so.

Tatum took it up.

“Then follow Revell.”

“Oh, as for that, I have.”

Tatum nodded.

“Good! You are over seven years of age.”

Glendenning nodded back.

“At the hotel where he is stopping, he has no visitors, receives no mail, never telephones.”

“Pays his bill regularly?”

“And in cash.”

“In twenty-dollar bills, perhaps. Where does he go?”

“To the Public Library or else to Miss Marcy’s.”

“He’s a bigger man than I thought.”

“In what way?”

“He stands alone⁠—or appears to. What hotel is he stopping at?”

“The St. Jasper.”

Tatum beat another brief tattoo.

“There are a lot of rooms in that house.”

“What of it?”

“It’s a pity we can’t go through them all.”

“Why?”

“Because Mike is in one of them. Have you a match?”

“There’s a box before you, but here’s a cigar. How do you get that?”

“Through the process of elimination. If Mike is not dead, he must be somewhere. If he and Revell are in league, they must be in touch. Since Revell has no visitors, receives no mail, does not telephone, and goes nowhere, they are in the same hotel. You told me that Mike was a good mimic, did you not?”

“And a born actor.”

“Then he is masquerading there, and probably in the room next to Revell. Anyway, he’s at the St. Jasper. Glendenning, I’ll stake my reputation on that. Well, yes, since you insist, I’ll have another high ball.”

Darkly, for a while yet, the two men talked.

X

“Oh! Miss Marcy⁠—”

At the cry, Camille, who was dressed for a run, stopped and turned.

In the hall, hurrying after her, was her maid, Margaret. As Camille stopped, she stopped also.

“What is it?”

But Margaret, her mouth working, made no reply.

“What is it?” Camille, perplexed at the mummery, impatiently repeated.

“Oh, Miss Marcy, Archibald’s on the floor. He⁠—”

Camille hurried by her and on and beyond to the extreme end of the apartment. There, in a little room which she had not seen since she first took the flat, the withered servant lay in a heap, the eyes staring, the face mottled, one corner of the mouth lifted as a dog’s when about to bite, and with things wrapped in paper beside him.

Camille looked in and bit her lip. Her tender heart reproached her. Only a little since she had said⁠—and crossly enough⁠—that she would not be sorry to lose him and now she had, or at least she supposed so, but she could not be sure; it might be but a fit of some kind, and she hurried back to the other end of the apartment, where she telephoned and waited until at last Dix appeared.

Telling him what little she could, she sent him in with the maid for guide, and that only because she was young and, to those that are, death, instead of being the normal interruption that it is, always suggests something spectral.

She was still in the hall when Dix returned.

“Cerebral hemorrhage,” he told her, and together they entered the drawing room.

In the physician’s hands were two packages, which he put on the piano.

“I can’t say I did not expect it,” he resumed. “He has been in to see me several times. He had nephritis⁠—and other things.”

Camille sighed.

“I am very sorry, He was queer, but he was faithful.”

“It’s difficult to be that and not the other,” Dix, with frank cynicism, replied. “I’ll have an undertaker come and⁠—”

“You say he had things the matter with him?”

“Yes, his conscience was affected. It was that that made him what you describe as queer. For the last few months, he has lived in a panic, and there are few toxins more depressive than fear.”

“Why, what on earth had he to be afraid of?”

Dix seated himself on the piano stool.

“What have we, any of us, to be afraid of except danger, damp sheets, and our own misdeeds? There is nothing else.”

Camille flicked at her boots.

“Yes, but⁠—”

Dix waved at her.

“An hour before your guardian died, I was with him; so was Archibald. Mr. Vulper was then apparently in his usual poor health. I was called away. When I returned, he was dead. You remember what occurred?”

“Yes, you sent for me. It was very painful.”

“I mean in regard to the safe.”

“You said that money was missing⁠—money and papers.”

Dix indicated the packages.

“There they are. In one of those bundles is ten thousand dollars in twenty-dollar bills. In the other is ‘Alpha and Omega’⁠—a manuscript that your guardian intended to leave to the British Museum.”

Camille, who had stopped flicking at her boots, sat down. A few minutes before, when, in answer to her call, Dix had come, she had not noticed the packages. Now she supposed that he must have brought them with him, though how and where he had got them she could not imagine.

“Well?”

Dix plucked at his beard.

“As Mike’s executor, I have impounded them. They are now part and parcel of the estate.”

“But where did they come from?” Camille, in a crescendo of surprise, exclaimed.

Dix glanced at her. Ordinarily he had thought her a bright young woman. At the moment, she seemed unfathomably stupid.

His arm shot out.

“From that room yonder. Where else?”

Camille stared and gasped.

“You mean Archibald’s? Then he took them! Then⁠—Why, then it was he who killed Mr. Vulper!”

At the thought of it, she shuddered. The thought that, since then, the man had been with her, under her roof, serving her, throttled, and she gasped again.

“Nothing of the kind,” Dix irritably replied. “It was chloral. After I had gone, cardiac paralysis supervened and narcosis resulted. Then Archibald happened in on him, and realizing, not, perhaps, that he was dead, but that he was unconscious, he took the money. And thinking⁠—very innocently⁠—to lay it on that fantastic hallucination, Shri Shankira, took the manuscript also.”

Dix removed his eyeglasses. By nature and by profession he was modest, but he could not help saying it: “I always knew it.”

In annoyance, Camille shook her crop.

“Doctor Dix, you should have told me!”

But Dix was not afraid of her.

“Oh, when I say I knew it, I mean I took it for granted. But I had no evidence. Archibald was aware of that. At the same time, he was aware, too, that I suspected him and, though he lacked the courage to own up, it would have been a sheer relief to him if I had said: ‘Thou art the man.’ ”

“Yet always before that he had been honest,” Camille wonderingly put in.

“How do you know? Anyway, he had probably never been tempted before by such a bevy of beautiful bank notes. ‘Carry us off,’ they cried at him. At that, all the cells of his brain fell asleep, all except one, and that cell, vehemently active, incited him to elope with them. When he did, somnambulism ceased; his entire brain awoke. He knew what he had done. He knew, too, the penalties for it. But it was too late. The theft had been discovered and ever since he has lived in a panic. When jurisprudence is more advanced, it will be recognized that any crime belongs to the domain of mental pathology. But forgive me for mistaking you for a clinic.”

“Well, I never!” Camille exclaimed. “And all the time Arthur Glendenning has been saying that it was Mike!”

Dix took the packages and stood up.

“I don’t think you need disturb yourself about what he says. By the way, how do you like Revell?”

“Very much,” the girl replied, but she flushed as she did so.

Dix, who saw everything, saw that.

“Oho! So we are in love, are we?” he thought.

But he said:

“Then I take it that Glendenning does not like him.”

Camille, too, got up.

“Like him! The last time he was here⁠—or was it the time before?⁠—he said that Mr. Revell had killed Mike.”

“Ah?” Dix indifferently rejoined. “Well, stranger things have happened.”

With the packages under his arm, he went on and out and reached his office, where he learned that the reception room was full. Before seeing any of the patients, he telephoned instructions to an undertaker, telephoned more to the Amsterdam Trust Company; after which, one at a time, with businesslike expedition, he bundled his patients off.

When all had gone, the bank messenger arrived. Dix gave him the packages.

“Here is a manuscript that belongs to the Vulper estate. Here are ten thousand dollars that belong to it, also. You may give me a receipt for both.”

Even an expert cannot count ten wads, of fifty bills each, in two minutes. Dix, judging that the messenger might be four or five at it, took down an old copy of a review.

In it was an account of a series of surgical operations performed on a woman who, though the account did not say so, perhaps wanted to be a belle⁠—a vocation for which she had been rather handicapped, for she had had a squat nose, high cheek bones, protruding ears, thick, wide lips, and eyes, like Anne Boleyn’s, each of a different color.

According to the account, these pleasantries of nature had been one and all⁠—and without a scar⁠—corrected.

The account continued:

“The cartilages were detached from the nasal bones, and the periosteum and tissues separated from them. A small portion of the septum was also removed, and so much of the bridge was then cut that when, toward the median line, both sides were broken with a forceps, they met and formed a perfectly straight Greek nose.

“With the lips, a longitudinal incision was made from the corner of the mouth, a half inch from the vermilion border, and run parallel with the white skin line, the incision being continued to the opposite corner. An oblong piece of the submucous and cellular tissue on each side of the median line was then removed, and, after turning away enough of the membrane, the operation was so conducted that, when the wound and its edges were approximated with fine silk sutures, the margin of the lip could be drawn down and rolled under, thereby acquiring the Cupid’s bow.

“With the cheek bones, the mucous membrane in the mouth was divided from the median line to the posterior border of the supermaxillary; all tissues, together with the periosteum, were separated; and when, with a chisel, enough of the molar bone was removed, a face symmetrically oval resulted.

“With the eyes⁠—”

But now the messenger interrupted.

“I’ve been over them twice, sir. I make it nine thousand nine hundred and eighty dollars. Will you count them yourself?”

Dix shook his head.

“Make out a receipt accordingly.”

That done and the messenger gone, Dix turned again to the story of the happy lot of the lady who wanted to be a belle.

Meanwhile, Camille, aware of the impatient cob and the patient groom and aware, too, that she was no longer in a mood for a run that day, sent Margaret to tell them not to wait. Deciding then that, temporarily at least, she could eat nothing in the apartment, she telephoned to Kate Delafield, arranged to have the girl join her for luncheon at a Fifth Avenue inn, and changed her costume for street dress.

Later, over eggs cooked in potatoes, a mousselined chicken, and poached peaches, the two girls talked as only two girls can talk, until Kate Delafield, remembering an appointment, abandoned Camille, who, in a taxi, sailed up again and on through the Park to Seventy-second Street, turned for the Riverside.

But in a moment Camille screamed, poked at the chauffeur, stopped him, jumped out, and darted down the subway stair. A ticket taker yelled and swore at her. She did not heed him. She did not hear. Intent only on catching up with a man whose face for a second she had seen, the cries of a hundred ticket takers would not have stopped her. Only, as it happened, an express was just pulling out. She had missed him.

“You wasn’t leaving me like this, was you, lady?”

She turned. Before her was the chauffeur.

There are explanations that explain nothing. Camille attempted none. Accompanied by the chauffeur, who, on the landing above, winked with unfathomable good-fellowship at the fuming ticket taker, she reentered the taxi and drove to her home, where, as she was paying the man, Glendenning marched up.

“I’ve had such a start!” she told him. “I thought I saw Mike.”

“Where? When?”

“Just now, at the subway entrance.”

“Well, you may have. But I hardly think so. He never goes out in the daytime.”

Camille moved back.

“What do you mean?”

Glendenning, balancing himself on one foot, replied:

“Revell has him locked up at the St. Jasper.”

Indignantly the girl’s lip curled. “Oh, come now! First you had Mike murdering his father. Then you had Mr. Revell murdering Mike. Now he has him in a cage. Well, I believe that as much as I do the rest of it.”

“Camille,” he snorted, “there are things that you never consider. Who took the money from my uncle’s safe? Who⁠—”

“Ask Doctor Dix.”

But already, with a gesture of annoyance, she had turned. It was from over her shoulder that she threw those three small and, to Glendenning, entirely enigmatic words.

At once he protested.

“I will come in with you.”

Angrily she shook herself. Never again would she allow him or anyone else to say a word against Revell, who, from the drawing room window, was at that moment smiling down on both.

“You need not, then,” she threw as before at Glendenning. “For I won’t be at home.”

She flew in, flew up, and, finding Revell, flew into his arms.

XI

“There is something so commercial about a diamond. You never see one without wondering what it is worth. But in the ruby is the secret of beauty. Like the rose, it charms and does nothing.”

Camille, listening to Revell’s remarks, looked at the stone he had brought her. After the manner of the modern girl that she was, she cared little for jewels. But there are old-fashioned conventions that still persist, and an engagement ring is one of them.

Already she had told him about Archibald, about the money and the manuscript⁠—a little string of episodes that interested him hugely, far more, indeed, than she had imagined they would; and it was after he had absorbed the story that the ring⁠—and the remarks⁠—were produced.

“But though I love you with all my heart,” he resumed, “though I loved you from the beginning and shall love you to the end, I cannot decently ask you to marry me until you are informed of certain things.”

Camille assumed the look of a martyr.

“Don’t! I’m overburdened with information now.”

“So am I,” answered. “I must share it with you. One night in San Francisco, Mike and I ran into a poor devil who was so ill that he could hardly stand. He said that he was without a friend or relative in the world and begged us, for the love of God, to help him. On the corner was a cheap lodging house where we took him and got him a room in which Mike left his passport. The next day the man died, and it was the name on the passport that was entered on the death certificate.”

Through the window came the light and eagerness of the April sun. But the room seemed suddenly dark. In that darkness Camille, who had been sitting very close to Revell, edged from him. She did not know what to say, nor yet what now to expect. It was a moment, even, before she could speak.

“You say Mike was with you?”

“Certainly he was with me.”

“Then what became of him afterward?”

“Nothing in particular. He’s very well, though, if that is what you mean.”

“But his will, then? A live man can’t have his will entered for probate, can he?”

“Now that you mention it, I don’t think that any live man ever succeeded in doing so before. But Mike can be very surprising. When he first learned of his father’s death and of the suspicions his absence had aroused, his first impulse was to return here. But as I told him, first impulses are to be guarded against. They are almost invariably noble. Then, on reflection, he agreed with me that it would be stupid to run the risk of being arrested for a crime that he had not committed, that he could not disprove, but that inevitably Glendenning would try to fasten on him. And he agreed too, that, meanwhile, it would harm no one if he remained out of sight. Now, though, in view of Archibald, it is all quite different.”

Camille, who had been looking down, looked up. The room seemed brighter, the air less charged.

“I told you an awful whopper about it,” Revell continued. “But though I lied like a thief, it was for you. Honest men never lie except to those they love. For those they love, a good, straight lie is often a great protection. It preserves them from that vulture of the mind that worry is. Then, too, agreeable people only say agreeable things, and there is nothing better for the complexion. If, when I first got here, I had told you that Mike was playing possum and that I was just masquerading as his heir, you would have shown me the door⁠—which I admit is very pretty and well worth being shown. But you wouldn’t have liked it. Perhaps you don’t like it even now.”

Camille sighed and shook her docked hair.

“Oh, I suppose I shall when I get used to it. But just now I feel all upside down. Whenever I get mixed up, it gives me a headache. Why is that?”

Revell took her hand.

“In the present case, I suppose because you don’t know whether or not you can forgive me.”

At that, she put her other hand on his.

“Victor, when a girl loves a man, she can forgive him anything. Only⁠—”

“Only what?”

“Don’t give me any more headaches.”

“Not if I can help it, though Mike may.”

“Oh, that reminds me. I could have sworn I saw him today in the street.”

“And I can swear you did not,” thought Revell, but he only smiled.

“It gave me such a start! Afterward I told Arthur Glendenning, who said that it could not be Mike⁠—that you kept him locked up at the St. Jasper.”

“Where the deuce did he get that?” thought Revell.

But he said:

“Glendenning is a very amusing person. He ought to be on a barrel organ with a chain around him.”

“Anyway,” Camille continued, “Mike might come to see me. Where is he?”

“He’s here. He’s in town. But what would be the use of his coming? He said you wouldn’t look at him.”

“But I always liked him.”

“He said he didn’t want to be liked. He wanted⁠—”

“I know, and I couldn’t. I was waiting for you, Victor! For you!”

“But he will dance at our wedding, if you’ll forgive me my lies.”

Then, through the brief blue afternoon, they talked. Finally Revell stood up.

“I’ll come again tonight, dearest. But meanwhile do you remember anything about a silver coin? Mike told me he gave you one the night he went away.”

“Yes, I have it somewhere. Why?”

“Mike told me to get you to run a finger around the edge of it.”

Perplexed, and very prettily perplexed, Camille got up.

“He did? What for?”

“In order that you may find what otherwise you might never discover⁠—a spring on which you are to press and say, ‘Sesame!’ The coin will open like Aladdin’s cave⁠—or was it Aladdin’s? Anyway, that’s what you are to do.”

“And then?”

“I’m not supposed to know anything else. But after you’ve opened the coin, will you telephone?”

“Certainly I will, Victor. But as you’re coming this evening, what do you want me to say?”

“That you want me to come.”

“But I can tell you that now.”

“You see, between now and then, you may change your mind.”

“Oh, now I’m all mixed up again! And you promised not to give me another headache!”

“But I was careful not to promise for Mike. This is his doing, not mine.”

Then, in a moment, after certain ceremonies, Revell went out and on to the St. Jasper, where two men ominously waited.

XII

Late that same afternoon, Tatum, sitting back in his office chair, glowered fiercely at the Archibald episode, which Glendenning, who had got it from Dix, was relating. He glowered the fiercer because already he had been assured by the St. Jasper’s house detective that there was nobody masquerading there, no mysterious guest.

The tale about Archibald, dumped on top of that, knocked momentarily the props from under. But the fiercer Tatum looked, the more gently he talked, and in his mayonnaise voice he summarized it.

“Well, then, we have got to get at it another way, and this, I’ll lay a cooky, is the way of it. Since Mike has no reason to be in hiding and yet can’t be found, he is dead, dead as a doornail. In view of which, we can now accept that Alaska romance as truth⁠—some of it at any rate.”

Glendenning, pulling at his long nose, whinnied:

“Ha! Revell did for him up there, pitched him overboard, drowned him in that White River.”

“Possibly,” Tatum cooed, “and very probably. But previously, in San Francisco, two men were planning to go prospecting for gold far up in a land that has its hazards. One of the men⁠—Revell, let us say⁠—mentions the dangers, and with noble disinterestedness offers to make a will in his partner’s favor; whereat Mike, not to be outdone, makes one in favor of Revell, who, in return, sandbags him at the first opportunity. After which, unable to show that Mike died a natural death, he is up a tree and stays there until, through sheer luck, he happens on and rechristens a moribund tramp. That’s the size of it.”

Glendenning kicked a foot out.

“And it fits!”

“Now,” Tatum, in his prima-donna manner, resumed, “we go to this Mr. Revell, you as your uncle’s heir and I as your counsel. We get him in a quiet corner and drive those two facts quietly home. Then I say: ‘Mr. Revell, we⁠—er⁠—propose to attack the will on the ground that while⁠—er⁠—personally I am convinced that the testator is dead, I know that⁠—er⁠—he did not die in the Morrow House.’ First blood. Eh? What?”

“Good for you! Hit him again!”

“I say to him: ‘Mr. Revell, the proceedings may be long and costly and in any event will have⁠—er⁠—the widest publicity. In the course of that publicity, it may be discovered just⁠—er⁠—well, just what did happen to my client’s unfortunate cousin. Now, Mr. Revell, my client wishes to avoid proceedings, precisely as you, I am sure, wish to escape⁠—er⁠—notoriety. For your own sake, let us spare you that. Moreover, we are not bandits; we are honest men. Deed us two-thirds of your interest under the will and in consideration of that, we, for our part, undertake not to contest it.’ ”

Glendenning jumped up.

“That’s the talk! Let’s be at him!”

Tatum consulted his watch.

“He may be going to make a night of it.”

“Not he!” Glendenning snorted. “He’s one of those devils that sit in their room and read.”

Then, in the subway presently, the two men were en route for the St. Jasper, of which the hall, saturated with tobacco and electricity, full of people, of hurrying pages, of parties coming in for dinner, and of guests eying each other hostilely or with indifference, resounded with voices, with the click of the typewriter, and the noise of lifts that ceaselessly rose and descended.

The two men, entering there, asked for Revell and, learning that he was not then in his room, stood about for a while and waited.

Finally Glendenning nudged Tatum.

“There he is now.”

Through the hall he lounged along and, seeing Glendenning, approached, but without any of the amenities, without even a nod.

Glendenning was more gracious.

“Revell,” he began, “this is Mr. Tatum, my counsel.”

Revell looked the lawyer up and down.

“Well, what of it?”

The insolence was so marked that it gave Glendenning pause, but suavely, in that voice of his, Tatum took it up. “Mr. Revell, we would like a little private conversation with⁠—”

Revell cut him short.

“I dare say. But it will have to be public and it will have to be brief.”

For a man usually so civil, it was all a bit odd. But toward the world at large and these men in particular, Revell felt waspish. He did not know what, at any moment, the telephone might have to say.

“Mr. Revell,” Tatum oleaginously resumed, “it is not a matter that you would wish to have us talk of here.”

Revell, extracting a cigarette, lit it and with the same insolent indifference replied:

“You may scream it, for all I care.”

For a fierce-looking man Tatum could smile very archly. That smile he exhibited.

“Mr. Revell, you are⁠—er⁠—in a very awkward predicament.”

Revell nodded.

“I should say so! It’s always awkward to be held up. What the devil do you want?”

Oilily Tatum rubbed his hands.

“Perhaps we had best adjourn to the café.”

Revell blew a ring of smoke.

“I seldom drink, and never with strangers.”

“Mr. Revell, believe me, we are your friends.”

Revell laughed, but it was not a pleasant laugh.

“Then, to employ an antique jest, you ought to sue your faces for libel.”

Archly once more Tatum smiled.

“You may think better of that when I tell you that you are in imminent danger of arrest. Don’t you think now that we’d better find a quiet little corner?”

“Less than ever. If you have any charges, call the police.”

At that, into it, Glendenning jumped.

“If he does, the charge will be murder!”

Tatum turned to him.

“Tut, tut! Softly does it.” He turned to Revell. “My client is a bit brusque. He probably wished to represent that the man who died at the Morrow House was not his cousin.”

“Well, what of it?”

“What of it?” Tatum, affecting the profoundest astonishment, exclaimed. “Why, Mr. Revell, if that man was not Mike, where is Mike?” He paused, dropped his voice, and unconcernedly added: “But I don’t need to ask⁠—I know.”

“What the deuce do you want, then?”

“To save you, as I said, from a very awkward predicament.”

“Thanks. I can take care of myself.”

“Mr. Revell, you will hardly say that when I, as the representative of this gentleman, my client, oppose the probating of the will of which you are the beneficiary on the ground⁠—Shall I tell you what it is in some quieter place?”

“No. Moreover, I don’t care a rap what your grounds are. I don’t care a rap whether you contest it or not. But meanwhile I have no intention of being blackmailed.”

Glendenning squared himself.

“You shall answer for that.”

Revell laughed again.

“See here, Glendenning. Do you believe in miracles? For you ought to, you know. It has taken a procession of them to keep you out of Sing Sing and I dare say that the same is true of your fat friend.”

Before either could retort, a page came bawling:

“Mr. Revell! Mr. Revell!”

Revell stopped him.

“Mr. Revell? Wanted at the telephone, sir.”

“Ask them to hold it a moment,” Revell instructed the lad and turned again to Glendenning. “Now drop your airs. Do you remember the last thing Mike said to you? He said, ‘I’ll surprise you yet.’ Mark my words, he will.”

He turned again, lounged down the hall, entered a booth, closed the door. He was in a quiet place at last.

Uncertainly, for a moment, the two men eyed each other. Tatum was the first to speak.

“That fellow has got a card up his sleeve. A card? He has a whole pack of them. Now, what are they? At the same time, he might have been more civil. That mention of miracles was very ungentlemanly.”

Glendenning did not immediately reply. When he did, he swore.

“Confound the brute! When he first got here, I felt that I had seen him somewhere and told him so, and what do you suppose he said?”

“What?”

“That he went there now and then.”

“Think of that, now! Sh! Here he is.”

Meanwhile, over the wire, Revell had been listening to Camille.

“Victor, I found the coin and the spring. It opened like a locket. Victor?”

“Yes?”

“In it was a slip of paper on which Mike had written that the slip was just to establish his identity in case of dispute. Victor?”

“Yes?”

“Mike said that he was going to have his face entirely altered and that Doctor Dix has some Medical Record which tells how it is done. Victor?”

“Yes?”

“Oh, Victor, are you you or are you Mike?”

“I don’t hear you?” replied Revell, who heard perfectly. “But no matter. Have you changed your mind or shall I come?”

“Come! Come! Whoever you are, I adore you!”

Now, that conversation at an end, Revell lounged along to finish the other, and very fit and fine he looked. And that scorn, that anger, where were they? Actually, he was offering Tatum his hand.

“I’m sorry to have kept you standing here. It was most inhospitable of me. I would have asked you elsewhere, but I was expecting a message. Now, though, if I may advise you, Mr. Tatum, and that gentleman your client, let me suggest that you ask Doctor Dix for a Medical Record that he has in his office and that contains an article written by a San Francisco surgeon. The article, if I remember rightly, is entitled ‘Facial Sculpturing,’ and when you have looked it over, you will perhaps understand what a man of your ability might have grasped long since.”

Tatum, glaring his fiercest, gently asked:

“And what is that?”

Revell had been speaking very engagingly, but he had been speaking, too, in a voice other than that which he habitually used, a voice before which Glendenning backed in sheer terror.

“What is it?” he repeated. “To my regret, I have hardly the time to tell you. But summarily the article is to the effect that a man⁠—for the sake, let us say, of winning a girl⁠—may have his appearance so altered that the girl will not recognize him⁠—or, for that matter, his own cousin, either.”

Glendenning, clutching at Tatum for support, spluttered feverishly:

“You don’t mean that you’re Mike?”

The impostor, smiling cruelly at him, smiled also at the lawyer.

“Take him home, Mr. Tatum. The dear boy never was strong⁠—particularly in the upper story.”

The effect of that was as abrupt as it was blighting. Tatum and Glendenning fell, open-mouthed, apart, fell literally to pieces. For a second, Glendenning, his jaw working, his eyes bulging, stared and swayed. Then, drunkenly, he staggered to the door.

But Tatum, who, with a mighty effort, was recovering, stood his ground. “Mr. Vulper, just that I may preserve your respect, let me assure you that from the start I suspected it. If now, or later, I can be of use, my address is⁠—”

Mike laughed.

“I don’t expect to die just yet, but, when I do, I may ask you to draw another will. It will be simple enough. Everything to my wife.”

On Tatum’s fierce face that arch smile feebly showed itself.

“Oh! You are married, then! I⁠—”

“Not yet,” Mike, making for the lift, replied. “But I shall be tomorrow. Good night.”

“Good night,” murmured Tatum, who, at the door, put that last straw on the broken Glendenning.