THE REST HOLLOW MYSTERY

BY REBECCA N. PORTER

NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1922

Copyright, 1922, by
The Century Co.

Printed in U. S. A.

TO MY BROTHER
WILLIAM STRATTON PORTER

That ideal reader of mystery stories—with
the ardor to pursue, the faith to believe
and the magnanimity to guess wrong

THE REST HOLLOW MYSTERY

CHAPTER I

Kenwick himself had no recollection of the accident. But he knew that there must have been one, for when he recovered consciousness, his clothes were full of burrs, his hat was badly crushed, and there was a violent throbbing in one of his legs.

With both hands gripping the aching thigh in a futile effort to soothe its pain, he dragged himself into the clearing and looked about. It was one of those narrow, wooded mountain ravines that in the West are classed as cañons. Back of him rose a succession of sage-covered slopes, bleak, wintry, hostile. In front was a precipitous cliff studded with dwarf madrone trees and the twisted manzanita. Overhead the bare distorted sycamore boughs lashed themselves together and moaned a dreary monotone to the accompaniment of a keen November wind. No sign of autumn lingered on the landscape, and the shed leaves formed a moldy carpet underfoot. The cañon was redolent with the odor of damp timber and decaying vegetation.

Kenwick buttoned his heavy overcoat about him and limped painfully toward the cliff, keeping as nearly as possible a straight line from his starting-point. Although his surroundings were totally unfamiliar his mind was clear. But he had that curious sensation of a man who has slept all night in a strange bed, and in the first moment of wakening is unable to adjust himself to his environment. While he groped his way through the tangled underbrush his memory struggled to clear a passage back to the present.

At the foot of the cliff he stopped short, staring in horror at a spot a few paces ahead of him. A scrub madrone had been torn from the side of the ravine and had fallen to the bottom of the cañon, its mutilated roots stretching skyward like the grotesque claws of some prehistoric animal. The force which had torn it from its moorings had scarred the slope with other evidences of disaster; a limb lopped off here, a mass of brush ripped away there. A glistening object caught his eye. He stooped laboriously and picked it up, then dropped it, shuddering. It was a triangle of broken glass spattered with blood.

For half an hour he poked around in the brush searching for, yet dreading to find, a more gruesome object. Perhaps the driver had not been killed after all, he reassured himself. As he dimly remembered him, he was a friendly sort of fellow whom he had engaged to drive him out to the Raeburn place. As he climbed the steep hill now Kenwick tried to remember what they had been talking about just before this thing happened, but the effort made his head ache and landed him nowhere. A more vital conjecture was concerned with how long he had been lying at the foot of the ravine and why no one had come to his rescue.

When he gained the road there was nobody in sight. It was a splendidly paved bit of country boulevard curving out of sight into what Kenwick told himself must be the land of dreams and romance. He turned to the left and started to walk, aimlessly, hopping part of the time to save his aching leg. Surely some one would overtake him in a car soon and offer assistance. He had dragged himself over half a mile, stimulated by this hope, when he sighted a house set far back from the highway behind a vista of date-palms. He struggled up to the entrance and gazed through the bars of a tall iron gate. It was locked. And, as an extra precaution against intrusion, a heavy iron chain was swung across the outside. Through the trees the house was plainly visible, a colossal concrete structure with stone trimmings flanked on one side by a sturdy combination tank-house and garage. About the whole place there was an aristocratic, exclusive dignity that reminded Kenwick of one of the great English estates that he had once visited during a convalescent furlough spent near London. It was more like a castle than a private residence, with its high stone wall covered by dank clinging vines. The very trees that bordered the driveway had an air of aloofness as though they had severed all relationship with the rest of nature's family. It was inconceivable, Kenwick told himself, that guests had ever been entertained, unbidden, in that mansion. And yet it was here that he must apply for help.

Strength had deserted him. Courage had deserted him. Even self-respect was fast slipping away. Desperation alone remained; desperation lashed almost to fury by the agony in his throbbing leg. He or his companion must have been drunk, hideously drunk, to have met with such a mischance. And yet where could they have purchased a drink? He himself hated liquor, and he had no recollection of having been persuaded into illicit conviviality. As he searched for an opening in the stone wall, he took hasty stock of himself. The fur-collared overcoat would give him a certain social status in the eyes of this householder. His hat, though bearing the mark of riotous adventure, was obviously the hat of a gentleman. His shoes subscribed liberally to this classification and his dark broadcloth suit was conclusive. He felt in his pocket. There was neither watch nor money. But he could mention Raeburn's name. The wealthy New Yorker who was to have been his host undoubtedly stood high in this community.

His search along the wall brought him at last to a broken ledge of rock which might serve as a stepping-stone. He drew in his breath sharply, dreading the pain of the stupendous effort that he was about to make. Then he placed his sound foot on the ledge and dragged himself over the enclosure.

If the place had looked inhospitable from the outside it was even more formidable viewed from within. Only that portion of the acreage which immediately surrounded the house was under cultivation. On either side of this a wide expanse of eucalyptus forest sloped away from the road. They were half-grown saplings and the blue-gray of their foliage blended with subtle harmony into the somber winter landscape.

"Lord! What a lonely spot!" Kenwick muttered as he followed the driveway around to the side of the house. "Good God! Anything could happen in a place like this!"

The shallow stone steps echoed beneath his feet, and the door-bell, tinkling in some remote region, gave back a ghostly, deserted sound. Two more trials with the electric button convinced Kenwick that the place was untenanted. He made a shade of his two hands and peered into the plate-glass window that gave on the front porch.

What he saw was an elegantly appointed dining-room furnished in old mahogany and dull blue hangings. There were carved candlesticks on the sideboard, and in the center of the bare dining-table a cut-glass bowl full of English walnuts. The somber high-backed chairs ranged along the wall seemed to the man outside to be guarding the room like a body of solemn gendarmes. Slowly he turned, descended the shallow steps, and started around to the rear of the house. There must be some servant, he reasoned, some caretaker or gardener who could administer temporary relief and direct him to his destination. The ache in his leg was becoming unbearable. It was impossible for him to go on unaided. However reluctant this exclusive home might be to admit a stranger within its gates, it must conform to the laws of decency and bind up his wounds.

On the side path, bordered with monster oleanders and dusty miller, he stopped. The door of the garage was open. It seemed safe to assume that the chauffeur or caretaker lived in the commodious quarters overhead. Hope glimmered at last through the night of black despair. Almost blind with pain now Kenwick staggered toward that open door. In the dim light of late afternoon he made out a small room filled with garden tools. Beyond, through an inside window, was revealed a handsome black limousine standing motionless in the gathering darkness.

But the building was deserted. It was when he realized this that the dusk suddenly enveloped the man peering desperately in at the threshold. Through a bleak mist he saw the lawn-mower, garden hose, and beetle-black car dance together in hideous nightmare. And then the room full of garden tools rushed toward him. He felt the wheels of that sinister black car grinding into his neck, and he knew no more.

CHAPTER II

When Kenwick came to himself he was lying on a cavernous divan with a gorgeous Indian blanket over him and a tabouret drawn close to his side. In a far corner of the room a rose-shaded lamp was burning. It gave to the handsome drawing-room a rosy glow that seemed to envelop its every object in subtle mystery. For long minutes the sick man stared about the apartment without trying to move. Slowly the events of the last few hours came back to him. Very cautiously, like a man who has just recovered his sight after prolonged blindness, he felt his way back along the path that he had just traveled. It brought him at last to the door of the garage and the beetle-black limousine grinding over his neck.

He reached out and touched the spindle-legged table at his side. On it were his collar, tie, and a long-stemmed glass partly full of whisky. Very slowly he drained the remaining contents. Then he sat upright and gently touched his injured leg. It felt hard and tight. Whoever had done the bandaging had made up in force what he had lacked in skill, but the numbness of a too tight wrapping was an intense relief after his hour of agony. He limped across the long room to the entrance-hall and stood at length in the doorway of the mahogany-furnished dining-room guarded by the row of gendarme chairs.

This last evidence was conclusive. In some way he had gained admittance to the house with the barred gate. Evidently there had been some one close at hand when he fainted; some one who had authority to carry him through those impregnable doors. The thought gave him an uncanny feeling. But where was this gum-shod combination of mystery and mercy? In the curious way that the senses convey such intelligence he felt that the house was empty.

"Well, if I've got to stay here alone all night," he said to himself, "I'm going to see what this place looks like."

And so, using two light willow chairs as crutches, he started upon a slow tour of exploration. Through the swinging doors he passed into a butler's pantry and then into the kitchen. It was a large cheerful room with laundry in the rear. But although there were no soiled dishes about, it had an undefinable air of untidiness and neglect. A crumpled dish-towel was under the table. The sink was grimy and the stove spotted with grease. Even to Kenwick's inexpert eyes the room appeared somehow dirty and repellant.

He set the wine-glass that he had brought from the front room on the table and tried the back door. It was locked on the outside. Every door and window that he had tested so far was similarly barred. With a vague feeling of misgiving he returned to the drawing-room. It was very late. The alabaster clock on the mantel was ticking its way toward midnight. He felt ravenously hungry but shrank from touching any of the food upon the pantry shelves. He decided that until his host arrived he would sit in the den, a companionable little room, whose deep leather chairs invited him. The porte-cochère was on this side of the house and the home-comers, whoever they were, would doubtless enter there. No fire burned on the hearth but the house was comfortably and evenly warm. It was apparent that the caretaker was an expert furnace-man.

Kenwick was about to sink into one of the big chairs opposite the huge antlers of a deer when suddenly an object caught his eye. He struggled over to the telephone and took down the receiver. For five minutes he stood there holding it to his ear listening for the familiar hum that assures telephonic health. But the thing was dead. As he hung it up, it struck Kenwick all at once that it might be disconnected. The idea brought him a sense of unaccountable resentment. "My Lord!" he muttered. "I might as well be in a jail!"

He sank into one of the Morris-chairs and gazed out into the blackness of night. He could, he reflected, smash a window and make his escape that way. But why escape from comfort into bleakness? Jail or no jail he was lucky to have found such a haven. By morning somebody would have arrived and he could be taken to old man Raeburn's. He was probably worrying about him at this very moment. "I didn't break into this place though," Kenwick reassured himself. "Somebody in authority brought me in, so there's nothing criminal about staying on. And since there had to be an invader, better myself than some unscrupulous beggar who might make off with the family plate."

The reading-lamp upon the table was equipped with a dimmer. He drew the chain half its length, pulled the Indian blanket over him, and, in spite of the dull ache in his leg, was soon wrapped in the dreamless slumber of utter exhaustion.

When he awoke it was broad daylight and the dimly burning bulb of the reading-lamp shone with a futile bleary light. He extinguished it and drew up the window-shades. Sleep had refreshed him and he felt healthily hungry. The pain in his leg returned with almost overwhelming force when he attempted to walk, but a sharp-edged appetite impelled him to seek the pantry. He found the dining-room wrapped in the same somber stillness that it had worn the night before, the bowl of walnuts showing dully in the center of the table. From the kitchen table where he had set it the night before the empty wine-glass stared back at him. But there was something reassuring in its presence. It seemed to give mute evidence of the reality of this adventure.

From the butler's pantry Kenwick brought a can of coffee and half a loaf of bread. "Whatever my bill in this caravansary amounts to," he told himself as he measured out the coffee, "it's going to include breakfast. I've decided to sign up on the American plan."

On his trip back to the pantry he discovered upon the ledge inside the window half a dozen fresh eggs. They gave him a little shock of surprise. For he was certain that they had not been there before. The window was small and narrow, much too tiny to admit a human body. But whoever was detailed to take care of this place was apparently on the job. Kenwick resolved to be on the alert for the egg-hunter. In twenty minutes he had cooked himself an ample breakfast and carried it into the dining-room on an impressive silver tray. Memories of long-ago camping trips with his elder brother in the Adirondacks recurred to him as he ate. Everett was a master camper but had always hated to cook. In order to even things he had been willing to do much more than his share of the rougher work. Now as Kenwick drank his coffee and ate the perfectly browned toast and fluffy eggs, he blessed those camping trips and the education which they had given him.

And then his memory wandered from the wholesome sanity of those days to the first dreadful months of the war. From the chaos of that era, one night leaped out at him. It was the night that he had parted with Everett at the old Kenwick house, the house that had been the Kenwicks' for sixty years. Perhaps the stark simplicity of that scene, shorn of objective emotion by the presence of Everett's wife, was the very thing that enabled him now to extricate it from the tangle of days that preceded and followed it. Everett had laid his hand for just an instant upon the shoulder of the new uniform. "I'm all you've got to see you off, boy," he had said. "But if mother and dad could see you now they'd be proud and happy." And then had followed a sentence or two of promise, of affection, of admonition, murmured in a hasty undertone intended to escape the ears of the statuesque creature who was his brother's wife. Kenwick had wondered afterward whether they had escaped her, whether, anything vital ever escaped Isabel Kenwick. And yet his farewell to her had been a flawless scene. She was always the central figure in some flawless scene. His brother's whole life seemed to him to be enacted upon a perfectly appointed stage. There had been just the proper proportion of regret and pride in Isabel's voice as she bade him good-by; just the right waving to him from the steps and calling after him that whenever he returned his old room would be waiting with everything just as he left it.

And then he had come back and not found his room the same at all. Everything about the house seemed changed. His room was a guestroom now, and he had been relegated to a place on the third floor with dormer-windows. He hated dormer-windows. When his mother had been head of the home the third floor had been used only for the servants, but under Isabel's régime it had been converted into extra guestrooms, and there seemed to be a never-ending succession of guests.

So it had been no hardship to acquiesce in Everett's suggestion that he come out to California and recuperate from the war strain in Old Man Raeburn's hospitable Mont-Mer home. It was a splendid idea for Everett well knew that the West was more like home to him now than New York. Mont-Mer itself was unfamiliar, but only a few hours up coast there was San Francisco. And in San Francisco was——He felt in his pocket. But the slender flat object around which his fingers had closed during moments of desolation and peril in the trenches was not there. The realization that it had been pitched into the underbrush along with his money and watch stabbed him with a new pain. Her picture out there in that cañon where any casual explorer might chance upon it! Why, it was desecration!

He pushed aside the tray and went over to the long mirror in the door of the hall closet. In all his twenty-five years he had never given his physical appearance such intensive consideration. Vanity had never been one of his failings. And his fastidious taste in dress was more instinctive than consciously cultivated. Now the keen dark eyes traveled slowly from the brown hair brushed back from his forehead to the thin lips and firm square chin. His eyes were the wide-apart eyes of the student but it was the nose that gave his face distinction. Thin, sensitive, perfectly molded, it betrayed an eager, intense nature never quite at peace with itself. The hands with which he tried now to comb his disordered hair into decorum were the long-fingered, hollow-palmed hands of those who are blessed and cursed with the creative, introspective temperament. They were hands impatient of detail, eager to grasp at the garment of great achievement, resentful of the slower process of accomplishment. He had drawn himself to his full six feet. Army training had given him an extra inch, and of this one physical asset he was proud.

"Decent appearing," he mused, checking off the credit side of his ledger in businesslike tones. "Fairly prosperous, sane, and law-abiding. I wonder if I'll be able to convince my host of any of those things."

He decided suddenly to explore the upper part of the house. It would cost terrific physical effort, but a fury of restlessness possessed him. On the broad landing the stairway divided and took opposite ways. He turned to the left and a few minutes later found himself standing in the open doorway of what appeared to be an upstairs sitting-room. It was obviously a man's apartment. The smell of stale cigar smoke was in the air and on the table a pipe and ash-tray. It was the sight of the latter that brought Kenwick's fine eyes together in a deep-furrowed frown. From the cold ashes he drew out a half-smoked cigar. For a long moment he stood turning it in his hand. It couldn't have been in that tray for more than a few hours.

In the room beyond, separated from the sitting-room by portières, was a massive walnut bed, chiffonier, and shaving-stand. A blue-tiled bathroom completed the suite. The windows of all three were closed and locked. He went back to the hall, past another bedroom with door ajar, and descended the stairs to the landing. Here he paused to rest, gazing speculatively at the closed portals in the opposite wing.

"The modern American home," he decided. "He has one part of the house and she has the other."

His face twitched with the pain of his pilgrimage. It was going to be a crucial experience getting downstairs. While he stood there almost despairing of the feat of covering the distance back to the den, there came to his ears a sound that turned him cold. He forgot his pain and clung to the supporting post motionless as a statue.

The sound came again. He knew this time that it was not the hallucination of overstrung nerves. Dragging himself up by the banister, he knocked on the first door of the right wing. There was no response. He knocked again, then boldly turned the knob. The door was locked. But through the deathly stillness there came, after a moment's pause, the sound that he had heard before. It was the sound of a woman's stifled sobbing.

CHAPTER III

Kenwick stood outside the closed door, a curious numbness stealing over him. Was it possible, he asked himself, that there had been some one in this house during the last twelve hours? Was it possible that this person was a woman? A solitary woman? It was unmistakably a woman's voice, and there was no sound of comforting or upbraiding or other evidence of companionship. As he knocked again at the door he wondered which one of them was the more startled by the presence of the other.

The sobbing had abruptly ceased. There was dead silence. Had he been of a superstitious temperament he might have suspected that his knock had somehow released from bondage an unhappy ghost who, wailing over a dead tragedy, had vanished leaving this spectral house as desolate as he had found it.

But Kenwick had no patience whatever with the occult. For him life was too all-absorbing and vivid an enterprise to tolerate the pastel existence of ghosts. Through the stillness his voice cut its way like a torchlight cleaving a path through a blind alley.

"What's the matter?"

As he hurled this question through the panel, he reflected that, being a woman, she would probably reply, "Nothing." But there was no response. Kenwick persisted. "Can I do anything for you?" And then a voice that was little more than a whisper came to him.

"Who are you?"

Conscious that the name would mean nothing to her, he gave it with a touch of irritation. She must know that he couldn't explain his invasion of her house through that inscrutably closed door. He had never thought of the place as belonging to a woman. Nothing that he had seen in it so far bespoke a woman's presence. The embarrassment that he had felt during the first hours of his imprisonment ebbed back and for the moment robbed him of further speech.

"Please go away." The voice from the other side of the door was entreating. It was a cultured, beautifully modulated voice struggling against heavy odds for composure. Kenwick had the feeling that it was a voice that lent itself easily to disguise.

"I can't go away until I have told you about myself," he said firmly. "I must tell you how I happen to be here, an uninvited guest in your house." He gave her the story briefly and was horribly conscious that it lacked conviction. In his own ears it sounded like the still-born narrative of a debauchee. Having stumbled to the end he waited for her comment. It came after a long pause.

"I'm sorry you're hurt. I hope you'll feel better to-morrow." To-morrow! Did she expect him to prolong his visit indefinitely? The casual courtesy of her tone was more disconcerting than indignation or resentment or any other form of reply could have been. But he resolved savagely not to leave that door until he had obtained some sort of information.

"When I met with the accident I was driving out to the Raeburn house; Charles Raeburn. Do you know where he lives?"

"No."

"Well, tell me about this place, then, please. Whose is it?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know? And yet you live here?" Kenwick felt as though his brain were turning over in his head.

"If you call this living." He wouldn't have caught this reply at all if his ear hadn't been pressed close against the panel.

"Are you all alone here?"

There was no reply.

"Is any one with you?"

"Oh, please go away. Do have pity on me and go away."

She was alone, Kenwick decided, and was afraid to tell him so. The realization brought a wave of hot color to his face. He dragged himself painfully back to the landing. And from that distance he sent his voice up to her, freighted with reassurance.

"Don't be frightened. I'm pretty badly bunged up just now, but I found a revolver over in the other wing, and if anybody comes prowling about—well, I'm not a bad shot." Suddenly a new thought occurred to him. "Have you had anything to eat this morning? Are you hungry?"

"I think—I am starving."

It was like a spray of ice-water in his face. He stood for a moment considering, "I'll get you something," he promised. "If you don't want to come out I'll fix it and bring it up on a tray."

"There would be no use."

"Why not?"

"Because I can't open the door."

"Are you in bed?" His voice had sharpened.

Silence again, from which he concluded that she was. He stood there staring at the heavy mahogany door as though by the mere intensity of his gaze he could dissolve it. For a long moment he was lost in thought, but he was not trying now to solve the riddle of the woman on the other side of the barrier. The needs of the immediate present were all that concerned him. Finally he spoke again.

"Is your bed anywhere near a window?"

"Yes."

"Is the window open?"

"Yes."

"Then listen. I'll go downstairs and get something for you to eat. I'll put it into a bucket, attach some kind of rope with a weighted end to it, and throw the end in at your window. I can't get outside so I'll have to do it from the pantry window and it may take some time, but I'll keep at it. When the end comes in, pull up the bucket. Do you see?"

"I'll try to."

He turned away and began the long trip down to the kitchen. Now that he was animated by a desire to help somebody else, the depression which had enveloped him was momentarily dissipated. In spite of the ever-present pain he felt almost elated when at last he arrived again in the kitchen.

Half an hour later the "rope," manufactured from several towels tied together, with a potato-masher on the end, flew in at the window just above the pantry and the carefully covered bucket disappeared from sight. "Pretty neat," Kenwick remarked to himself. "I had no idea that I could do it when I told her I would."

But the strain had been too great. He was suddenly aware that every nerve in his body was aching. Back in the den he sank down on the couch where he had spent the night. Conjecture about the woman upstairs was submerged now beneath his own physical misery. The shelves in the library were empty. There was nothing to read save a paper-backed copy of one of Dumas's earlier novels, which he discovered in a corner. He took it up and tried to lose himself in the story, but it couldn't hold him. He found himself wondering resentfully why old man Raeburn hadn't shown more interest in his non-appearance. He was furiously impatient and utterly helpless. And he told himself that these two cannot live long together without wrecking the reason. Never before in his life had he been in a position where he couldn't do something to alter obdurate circumstance. To do anything would be better than to do nothing. The thought came to him all at once that this was what women, overwhelming numbers of women, must have endured during the terrible years of the war just past. There must have been whole armies of them, furiously eager to shoulder guns and march away to the trenches with the men they loved. And instead they had to submit to being caged up in houses and, blindfolded to all vision of the outer world, perform day after day the dreary treadmill duties of routine existence. For the first time he found himself wondering why more of them hadn't gone insane under the pressure. He was certain that he himself would lose his mental balance if the blindfold wasn't soon removed from his mental vision.

Suddenly he sat up and tossed aside his book. There was the sound of a footstep on the gravel walk at the other side of the house. Pushing a chair before him he followed the sound out to the dining-room. Through the window he saw a tall, ungainly looking boy walking toward the tank-house garage. He was carrying a long pole and a pair of pruning shears. So this was the accursed gardener, the mysterious gatherer of eggs, who, having brought him into the house, was content to let him die there or make off with the family plate.

"Here, you!" Kenwick knocked on the window-pane. It was a loud resounding knock, but the boy walked on unheeding, carefully examining one end of his pole.

Kenwick tried the lock. He had noticed in a previous investigation that all the windows on the lower floor had double locks. Undoing them on the inside was futile until a spring released them on the outside. And Kenwick was in no mood for making mechanical experiments. For an instant he stood there, like some caged animal, staring after the gawky figure of the boy as though he were the embodiment of hope fading away in the distance. And then a blind fury seized him. Possessed only of the overpowering desire to gain the attention of the outside world, he suddenly doubled his fist and sent it crashing through the heavy plate-glass pane. It shattered into a hundred pieces and cut a deep gash in his wrist.

When he had bound this up in a handkerchief with deft first-aid skill, he leaned out through the ragged aperture that had been the window. The boy had vanished as completely as though he were a wraith. Kenwick, controlling his dismay with a stupendous effort, told himself that he had only gone to put away his tools and would soon come running back to investigate the damage. He stood there waiting, exulting in his revolt. In spite of the lacerated wrist this violent assertion of his rights brought an immense relief. Why, a person might be murdered in this place and it would be days before anybody would know a thing about it.

The boy did not return, and Kenwick made his way back to the den. It was mid-afternoon now and a heavy rain had begun to fall. He made no further attempt to read, but lay on the upholstered window-seat trying to find some position that would be bearable. He cursed himself for having used the leg so much. Had he remained quiet all day he might by now have been able to get away from this uncanny place. But the woman upstairs! He couldn't throw off an absurd sense of responsibility concerning her. From all that he could gather she was as helpless a puppet in the hands of fate as he. But of course she might have been lying to him. As he lay there on his back gazing out at the needles of rain driven aslant into the dank ground, he felt distrustful of the whole universe. Could there be any way, he wondered, of getting a message out of this house? There must be a rural delivery, and if so, at the gate would be a letterbox. But that gate——It seemed tortuous miles away.

A search through the empty drawers of the desk revealed several loose sheets of tablet-paper and the stub of a pencil. With this equipment he wrote out a telegram to Everett. The mere wording of it seemed to reinstate him somehow in the world of affairs. The problem of getting it into the office could be solved later.

At six o'clock he forced himself to go out to the kitchen again and prepare supper. The thought of eating revolted him, but the woman upstairs, liar, decoy, or invalid, must be fed. Dangling close to the pantry window was the white-knotted towel rope with the bucket on the end. He put into it the last of the loaf of bread and some boiled eggs. Then he called to her to pull it up. When the bucket had begun its erratic climb, he leaned out of the narrow opening and spoke with defiant triumph. "Did you hear me smash that window this afternoon? I was trying to get the attention of the gardener. And I'm going to get it too if I have to smash up everything on this place."

If she made any reply he did not catch it. The rain was falling fast now and there was the growling sound of approaching thunder. Back in the den again he turned on the reading-light, more for companionship than illumination. Could it be possible that he would have to spend another night in this ghostly house? The idea was intolerable, and yet there was no relief in sight.

Another hour passed, and darkness enveloped the world in a shroud-like mantle. The bandage with which Kenwick's leg was wrapped was a torture now. He unwound it and began to massage the badly swollen limb using the long firm strokes that he had learned from the athletic trainer during his university days. They seemed to ease the pain somewhat and he continued to rub until his arms ached with the effort.

Then all at once there came to his ears a sound that made him halt, every muscle tense with listening. It was a sharp incisive knocking and it seemed to come from the dining-room. He sat motionless, afraid to move lest it should stop. But it came again, a clear unmistakable knocking that had the dull resonance of metal clashing against metal. To Kenwick it was perfectly obvious now that someone was trying to gain entrance at that broken dining-room window. He tested his unbandaged foot upon the floor and drew himself stealthily to a standing position. And then he turned himself slowly in the direction of the darkened dining-room.

CHAPTER IV

The Morgan home on Pine Street was a rambling old house; the only shingle structure in a block of modern concrete apartments. To the elder Morgans it had been the fulfilment of a dream; a home of their own in San Francisco. Clinton Morgan had lived only a year after its completion, and his widow, in spite of the pressure of hard times and the inadequacy of the income which he left, had resisted all tempting offers to sell the old place and had brought up her son and daughter with a reverence for family tradition as incongruous to their environment and generation as was the old shingle house among its businesslike neighbors.

And then, eight years after Clinton Morgan's death, oil had been discovered in his holdings over at Coalinga, and the last year of Sarah Morgan's life had been spent in affluence. But she had never parted with the old home. At the end of that year she had called Clinton, Jr., then a young instructor in chemistry at the university, to her bedside and laid a last charge upon him.

"Clint,"—Her voice held that note of unconscious tyranny that approaching death gives to last utterances. For in the moment of dissolution there is not one among us but is granted the crown and scepter of autocracy. "Clint, don't let the old place go. Fix it over any way you and Marcreta like, but keep it in the family as long as you live."

"Yes, Mother."

"And Clint, there is something else."

"I know, Mother. It's Marcreta. But you needn't worry about her."

"I don't believe in death-bed promises. It's not right to try to tie up anybody's future. But——You see, if she were strong and well, I wouldn't be anxious; I wouldn't say anything but——"

"You don't need to say anything, Mother. I'll always look out for her."

A white, blue-veined hand stretched across the counterpane groping for his. A moment later Marcreta was holding the other and brother and sister faced each other alone.

It was about a year after this that Clinton Morgan brought home with him to dinner one night a young college fellow, just on the eve of graduating from the University of California. The friendship between the instructor and this undergraduate, five years his junior, had begun in the fraternity-house where Clinton dined occasionally as one of the "old men." And temperamental congeniality and diversity of interests had done the rest.

"He's slated to be one of those writer freaks." Thus he introduced the guest to his sister. "But he's harmless at present and he's far from home, so I brought him along."

Roger Kenwick looked into Miss Morgan's grave blue eyes and became suddenly a man. His host, surveying him genially from across the meat-platter, found himself entertaining a stranger. The gay persiflage which he had known over at "the house" was completely submerged under a maturity which he had suspected only as potential. In vain he tried that form of social surgery known to hosts and hostesses as "drawing him out." He mentioned a clever poem in the college magazine of which Kenwick was editor. He began a discussion of the approaching track-meet in which Kenwick was to support his championship for the hundred-yard dash. He tried university politics in which his guest was a conspicuous figure. To all these leads his fraternity brother made brief, almost impatient response. And Clinton Morgan was resentfully bewildered. He experienced that cheated feeling known to any one who has brought home exultantly a clever friend, and then failed in the effort to make him show off.

But he couldn't complain that Kenwick was tongue-tied. He was talking earnestly, but it was about future, not past achievement. Inspired by Marcreta's sympathetic interest, he unfolded plans of accomplishment of which until that moment he himself had been in densest ignorance. Clinton had seen other men change, chameleon-like, in the presence of his sister, and he found himself wondering now as he watched Kenwick take his headlong leap into the future, whether it was Marcreta's regal beauty which inspired their admiration or her physical disability which appealed to their chivalry.

Kenwick himself was scarcely conscious of the disability. He was only vaguely aware that there were cushions at Miss Morgan's back and that on the way in from the living-room she had leaned slightly upon her brother's arm. When the evening was over he left the Morgan home enveloped in a white fury.

"I've been a fool!" he told himself violently. "I've been frittering away my whole life. This college stuff is kids' play. If I wasn't just two months from the end I'd ditch it and break into the man's game of finding a place in the world."

"Great chap, Kenwick," Clinton was telling his sister. "But he wasn't quite himself to-night. I think he has some family troubles that worry him. Doesn't get on very well with his sister-in-law back East, I believe. That's why he came out here to college."

Marcreta made a random reply. She was wondering what kind of person Roger Kenwick's real self was. And she was soon to discover. For that evening marked the beginning of a new era for them both. Scarcely a week passed that he did not spend Saturday and Sunday evenings at the house on Pine Street. Sometimes he read aloud to her "stuff" that he had written for the local newspapers. Sometimes she read to him from her favorite books. Once she helped him plan the plot of an absorbing serial story. But often they didn't read anything at all; just sat in front of the open fire and talked.

In May Kenwick was graduated from the university, but was still living at the fraternity-house in Berkeley when there came a sudden summons from New York. He ought to come, Isabel informed him, for his brother was seriously ill. On the night before he left he made a longer call than usual at the Morgan home.

"Everett's the finest chap in the world," he told Marcreta. "He's been like a father to me. But——Lord! How I hate to tear myself away from here! And the worst of it is, I don't know how long I may have to stay. You won't forget me if it's a long time?"

And then all at once they were not talking about his trip any more, nor of Everett. "If you could only give me some hope to go on," Kenwick was saying. "Something to live on while I'm away."

But to this entreaty Marcreta was almost coldly unresponsive. She tried evasions first; asked solicitous questions concerning his plans; showed a heart-warming interest in his anxiety concerning his brother. But, forced at length to answer his persistent question, she said simply: "No. I don't care for you—in that way. Let's not talk any more about it. Let's not spoil our last evening together."

It brought him to his feet white and shaken. "Spoil my last evening with you!" he cried. "Spoil my whole life! That's what it will do if I can't have you in it." His fingers sought an inside pocket of his coat. "I've got your picture," he told her fiercely. "I got it down at Stafford's studio the other day. And I'm going to carry it with me always—until you give me something better."

A month after his arrival in New York he wrote her that his brother had recovered and that he would soon be coming back to find a position in a newspaper office in San Francisco. But he didn't come back. For it was just at this time that men began to hear strange new voices calling to them from out of the world-chaos. Day by day they grew in volume and in authority luring youth out of the isolation of personal ambition into the din and horrible carnage of war. Just before he left for a Southern training-camp Kenwick wrote her a long letter. In it there was neither past nor future tense. It concerned itself solely, almost stubbornly, with the present.

On the evening that she received it Marcreta held conference with her brother in the dignified old drawing-room. "Clinton, I want to make the old house take a part in the war. I've been talking it over with Dr. Reynolds. He says it would make an ideal sanitarium. I want to use it for the families of enlisted men; the women and children, you know, who are too proud for charity and who, for just a nominal sum, could come here and get the best treatment. If you were at the front, wouldn't it relieve your mind to know that somebody you loved, I for instance, was getting the proper care when I was ill, even though you couldn't provide it for me? I'll do all this out of my own money, of course, and keep your room and mine, so that this will still be home to you when—you come back from training-camp."

He stared at her incredulously. "Why, how did you——What makes you think that—I'm going away?"

"I saw Captain Evans's name on that envelope the other day, so I wrote to him and asked if you had quizzed him about war work," she told him shamelessly. "I couldn't help it, Clint. I had to know. I really knew anyway. Knowing you, how could I help seeing that you were mad to get away and help. Every man must be. But you've been afraid to broach it to me."

In his first moment of wild relief, he didn't dare trust himself to speak. When he at last ventured a response he plunged, manlike, into the least vital of the two topics. "But you don't quite realize what it would mean, Crete, tearing the whole house up that way. And the incessant confusion of having all those people around would be a frightful strain. With that spine of yours apt to go back on you at any time——It isn't as if you were a well woman."

The instant the words were out he regretted them. He saw his sister wince, but her voice was steady and eager with entreaty. "That's just it, dear. It isn't as if I were well and could do any work myself. But I can do this. I know what sick people need to make them comfortable. Oh, let me do it, Clinton."

He reached over and patted her shoulder. "I don't want to stand in the way of anything that would give you any happiness. But if it should be too much for you—and I so far away from you——"

"Even if it should be, you would come to see some day that I was right to do it. I have a right to take that chance. I have just as much right as a soldier has to stake my life against a great cause."

In the end he yielded, and together they planned the readjustment of their lives and the old home. Of the rooms on the lower floor, only the big library remained unchanged. But there were invalid-chairs ranged about the great room now and little tables holding bottles and trays.

On the Sunday evening before he left Clinton found his sister up in her room sorting over a pile of letters. "Well, your dreams are coming true, Crete," he told her. "Dr. Reynolds is delighted with this place and—you're sending a man to the service."

She looked up at him with a smile, and it flashed across him suddenly that she had done more than this. A silence fell between them, the tense throbbing silence that precedes a last farewell. He felt that he ought to say something; something comforting and cheerful. But the Morgans were reserved people, and they found confidences incredibly difficult. So he stood there looking down at her, thinking that she always ought to wear that soft blue-gray color that seemed to melt into her eyes and bring out all the richness of the dark curves of hair. It was so that he would think of her in the days that were to come—a fragile but gallant figure sitting at the old mahogany desk sorting out letters.

Suddenly she pushed them aside and rose to her full splendid queenly height. She knew that the moment of farewell had come and was not grudging it its crucial moment of life. He came toward her and put his two hands lightly on her shoulders. But words failed him utterly. For his glance had fallen upon the pile of letters which she had tied with a narrow bit of white ribbon. And he noticed for the first time that they were all addressed in the same handwriting.

CHAPTER V

Before going to investigate the knocking in the dining-room, Kenwick picked up the loaded revolver which he had brought down with him from the upstairs sitting-room. He felt himself so completely at a disadvantage against any chance invader that only such a weapon could even the score. Besides, there was the sick woman upstairs. He had her to protect. He hobbled across the hall, making as little noise as he could. But the process of getting into the dining-room took considerable time. There was plenty of time, he reflected, for the intruder to become discouraged or emboldened as the case might be.

As he crossed the room an icy blast struck him from the open window, and he told himself savagely that he wished he had left it alone. You couldn't expect a furnace to heat a house with a gale like that blowing into it. He had dragged himself to within a few feet of the pane when all at once he stopped. Two wide boards had been nailed across the aperture. It was a clumsy job, hurriedly done. Kenwick stood there gazing at it. So it was only for this that he had made the painful journey from the den! And the carpenter was gone. The customary deathly stillness prevailed.

He stood there listening for the sound of retreating footsteps but it was another sound that caught his ear. What he heard was the far off chugging of an automobile engine. He remembered now that the place was on a corner; that he had walked what had seemed miles after turning that corner before he had come to the iron gate. He was thinking rapidly. This was his one hope. If he could manage to get out to that gate by the time the motor-car reached it, he could get help. How ill the woman upstairs might be he could not guess, but they were both terribly in need of aid. At any cost he must get out to the road.

He laid the revolver upon a grim, high-backed chair and threw his whole six feet of strength against one of the wide boards. It gave under the pressure with a long tearing noise and hung outward dangling from its secure end. Kenwick took up the revolver again, worked himself out through the ample opening, and landed cautiously upon the gravel walk beneath the window. Clutching at the branch of a giant oleander bush he called up to the patient upstairs; "I'm going out to the gate. I don't know what will happen to me before I get back, and I don't care. But I'm going to get help or die trying."

There was no response. He wondered, as he started along through the blackness, whether the woman could be asleep. How could any one sleep in this ghastly place. Some people didn't seem to have any nerves. But she might be dead. The thought brought him to an abrupt halt. But in that case it was more imperative than ever that he toil on.

The rain had stopped now and the lawn under his feet was soggy and water-beaten like a carpet that has been left out in a storm. He thanked fortune that it was not slippery but gave beneath his staggering tread with a resilience that aided progress. It was impossible for him to proceed at anything faster than what seemed a snail's pace. The machine must have passed the gate by this time, but there would be others. If he ever reached that distant goal he would stand there and wait.

Across the circle of lawn, around the arc of drive, he made his laborious way with clenched teeth. And so at last he came to where the tall gate loomed black and forbidding through the darkness. The heavy chain still swung its sinister scallop before it, seeming more like a prison precaution now than a warning against invasion. As he looked at the stone fence, stretching away from it on both sides, and recalled the agony with which he had scaled it, courage fled. He'd rather die, he decided, than attempt to struggle over that parapet again. So he stood, supporting himself by one of the iron rods of the gate, listening for the sound of an engine. It came at last, growing louder as the car turned the corner a quarter of a mile away. It was evidently traveling slowly in low gear. The reason was soon apparent. Its engine was missing fire.

On through the darkness it came, its lights blazing a path for its faltering progress. There was a noise of violently shifted gears and then the heavy, greasy odor of a flooded carburetor. Behind the lights there slid into view almost opposite the tall gate a high-powered roadster. A man wearing huge glasses that gleamed through the dark like the eyes of some superhuman being sprang out and wrenched open the engine hood.

For a moment Kenwick watched him, dreading to speak lest the stranger vanish and leave him solitary as the gardener had done. And then abruptly he sent his voice hurtling through the night. At sound of it he recoiled. Only those who have suffered in solitude the agony of a nameless terror know the ghastly havoc that it can work upon the human voice. Kenwick's held now a harsh, ugly tone that had in it something like a threat. The man at the engine wheeled about and leveled his huge eyes at the spot from whence the summons came. "What the devil——?" he began.

And then explanations tumbled through the barred gate in an incoherent torrent. They left the motorist with a confused impression of an automobile tragedy, a bed-ridden woman, a feeble-minded gardener, and a haunted house.

In sheer perplexity he began drawing off his heavy gantlet gloves as though to prepare for action. "Take it slower," he advised. "I don't get you." And then he noticed that the man on the other side of the gate was hatless and without an overcoat. "My Lord!" he cried anxiously. "You'll freeze out here, man!"

"Then for God's sake come in here and help me!" Kenwick entreated. "I don't know whose place this is but it ought to be investigated. There's a woman in here who's ill, and somebody has locked her into her room. I'm not able to do a thing for her or for myself. Do you know what house this is?"

The stranger shook his head. "No, I'm just out here on a visit." Kenwick groaned. There flashed into his mind the stories of some of his friends who had toured California and who were unanimous in their conclusion that everybody in the southern part of the state was merely a visitor. "But whom do they visit?" Everett Kenwick had once inquired and nobody could supply him with an answer.

"Then you don't know where the Raeburn house is?" the man inside the gate asked hopelessly.

The motorist shook his head again. "I'll tell you what though," he suggested. "You get back into the house out of this cold and I'll send somebody back here. I'm having engine trouble and I've got to get into town."

Kenwick was fumbling with numb fingers in the pocket of his coat. He stretched an oblong of white paper through the bars of the gate. "If you're going in town, take this," he pleaded. "It's a message I want to send to my brother in New York. Kenwick is the name and the address is on the outside."

The stranger stopped on his way to the gate and a curious expression crossed his face. And just at that moment Kenwick caught the sound of another voice speaking from inside the car. He couldn't catch the words, for the coughing of the engine beat against his ears. The man in the goggles climbed to the seat and the next minute the machine was moving jerkily away.

Cold desolation seized Kenwick. But he felt certain that the stranger would return. There was nothing mysterious nor uncanny about him. But how long would he have to wait there on the drenched gravel before help could get back to him? It wouldn't do to catch cold in that leg and add a fever to his other troubles. He must get back into the house. Out there on the bleak road he thought longingly of its warm comfort. Everything that he had done since he came into it seemed now to have been the wrong thing. A horrible sense of incompetency, the first that he had ever known in all his vivid, effective life, surged over him. And added to this was a curious sense of having lost something. Was it Marcreta Morgan's picture that he missed? He told himself that it was, but he was only half satisfied with this assurance.

Arguing the matter with himself, he had covered half the distance around the driveway when suddenly a sharp reverberation rang through the air. It was the report of a gun. Almost immediately this was followed by a woman's scream.

Kenwick stood still, balancing himself unsteadily upon his well foot. The sound had come from the direction of the house. Did it herald a tragedy or was it merely a signal? Scarcely knowing why he did it, except to relieve the physical tension and to make his presence known, he gripped his own revolver and fired two answering shots upward into the night.

CHAPTER VI

The one idea which possessed Kenwick after dragging himself back through the broken window was to find out if the woman upstairs was safe. The journey out to the big gate and back had consumed almost an hour, and as he pulled himself in between the wide board and shattered glass he felt that it must have been years since he had gone on that painful quest. He rested for a few moments and then went into the front hall.

To his amazement he found it ablaze with light. Brilliant too was the living-room beyond. In the latter he had never used anything but the shaded lamp upon the table. Now the chandeliers in the ceiling had been lighted from the switchboard button. It was evident that some one had been all over the lower part of the house while he was gone. It must have been the woman upstairs. There was no one else on the premises except that half-witted garden boy.

Grimly resolved to discover whether his mysterious companion was still concealing herself behind locked doors or whether her apartment had been stormed by some prowler he made his way up to the room in the front of the right wing. As he approached it he called to her asking if she was all right. There was no response. He knocked. The sound echoed dully down the handsome stairway. Then in a futile sort of way he tried the knob.

This time it yielded to his touch and swung slowly open. For a moment he hesitated, dreading to snap on the light. Then the stillness grew oppressive. His quick, impatient fingers groped along the wall, found the switch-button, and pressed it. The mysterious apartment flashed into sudden reality.

Kenwick looked about him, bewildered. The light revealed a large handsome room furnished in golden oak. There was a massive double bed, bureau, dressing-table, and several luxurious chairs. A heavy moquette carpet deadened every footfall, and the rose-colored draperies at the windows admitted only a restricted view of the outer world. But it was the condition of the room, not its furnishings, that puzzled the man upon the threshold. Dust covered every polished surface. The hearth was swept clean. There had been no fire on it for months, perhaps years. On the bed was a mattress but no coverings. The mirrors on bureau and dressing-table showed a thin veil of dust. There were no toilet articles, no personal belongings of any kind. The room was evidently a woman's but there was no hint of a woman's presence, except that in the air hung a faint perfume of heliotrope. He remembered suddenly that it was the perfume that Marcreta Morgan had always used.

Kenwick went over to one of the chairs and sat down. He felt intensely relieved. If the woman had gone away she would certainly send some one back to the house, for she knew that he was alone and injured. But how had she gone? Was there another entrance to these somber grounds? For half an hour he sat there trying to think it out. The room grew very cold. It had apparently been shut off from the furnace connection. He arose at last, stiffly, and went back downstairs, switching off the lights. In the living-room and hall he turned them off too, for they gave to the solemn rooms a garish, incongruous splendor.

He went into the den and took his old place on the upholstered window-seat. It may have been twenty minutes later that he heard the sound of wheels crunching the gravel of the driveway. He listened intently. No, this time he was not mistaken. Some vehicle was approaching the house. The stranger in goggles had been true to his promise and had sent back help, or perhaps returned himself. At last this hideous bondage was to end. He limped into the living-room and without turning on the light, peered out. There was no one in sight and no sound of voices, but at the foot of the front steps stood a long black car. It recalled to him in a flash the beetle-black limousine that he had seen in the tank-house garage.

Impelled by his entry into the room upstairs to try the front door, he turned the knob. It was unlocked. Whoever had come in or gone out had been in too much of a hurry to fasten it this time.

And then, standing there at that half-open door, Kenwick suddenly lost his headlong impatience. For the realization came to him at last that his experiences of the last twenty-four hours were no casual adventure. This was a game, perhaps even a trap. He had inadvertently stepped into a carefully laid plot. That it had been obviously prepared for somebody else did not alter the seriousness of his present position. Whoever was engineering the thing had assumed that he would do and say certain things. And now, he reminded himself angrily, he had probably done and said them all. Certainly his every move had been direct, impetuous, glaringly obvious. He would have to change his course unless he wanted to die in this accursed house. This game, whatever it was, couldn't be won by throwing all the cards face up on the table and demanding a reckoning. The other players wore masks. If he was to have any chance against them he must adopt their tactics.

He assured himself of all this while he limped down the shallow porch steps. He hadn't the faintest notion of what he was going to do next, but decided to trust to impulse. He had reached the lowest step when all at once he recoiled. Almost with his hand upon the beetle-black limousine he discovered that it was not a limousine at all. It was a hearse.

At that same moment, he heard, coming from the near distance, the voice of some one speaking with unaccustomed restraint. It was a raucous voice talking in a harsh whisper. And then there was a sound of footsteps approaching.

Without an instant's hesitation Kenwick opened the door of the hearse, pulled himself inside, and drew it shut, unlatched behind him. There was no definite plan in his mind except to escape. And the woman had apparently fled so he felt no further responsibility for her.

The steps came nearer. In another minute some one might jerk open the door and discover him. And he remembered uneasily that now he was not armed. He had left the revolver on the table in the den. The footsteps stopped close to his head and a man's voice called to somebody at a distance.

"My orders was to come out here. That's all I know about it. But I'm not goin' to get myself tied up in any mess like this. It's up to the coroner first. It just means that I'll have to make another trip out here to-morrow."

Kenwick heard him clamber to the high seat, and heard him jam his foot against the starter, heard its throbbing response. And then he started away on his long weird drive through the black night.

He had expected his conveyance to be almost as close and stifling as a tomb, but was relieved to find that sufficient air came in through the crack of the door to make the trip endurable. The only provident thing that he had done during the whole adventure, he decided, was to put on his overcoat and hat before leaving the den. One journey bareheaded into the November night had been sufficient to warn him against a repetition of such rashness. He was dressed now as he had been when he first took stock of himself outside the tall iron gate.

The road was smooth asphalt all of the way, and the passenger, stretched at full length on the hard floor of the hearse, felt more comfortable than he had all that ghastly day. During the ride he tried to formulate some definite course of action. For now that the solitary desolation of the last twenty-four hours was ended, he was able to detach himself from its events and to view the whole experience as a spectator.

His vivid imagination pictured the somber house in a dozen different lights. But he discarded them one by one, and his interest centered about the identity of the woman upstairs and the single shot which had pierced the stillness of a few hours before. Of only one thing he was certain—that he was going to get out of Mont-Mer as speedily as possible. It was all very well to conjecture that the house might be the disreputable retreat of some Eastern capitalist, or a rendezvous for radicals, but he preferred to solve the riddle from a distance. He had no intention of being called as a witness in an ugly exposé. It would be easy enough to write to Old Man Raeburn and explain that it hadn't been possible for him to stop off on his way to San Francisco. He fervently hoped that he would never see Mont-Mer again. Without ever having really seen it he had come to loathe it.

He had ridden for twenty minutes or more when he felt the vehicle slow down. It made a sharp turn and came to a stop. Kenwick wondered if the driver would open the doors, and he lay there waiting, staring into the dark, impassive in the hands of fate. He heard the man climb down from his seat and then the sound of his footsteps growing fainter in the distance.

Ten minutes later Kenwick cautiously pushed open the flimsy doors and worked himself out of his hiding-place. He was in an alley enclosed on three sides by the backs of buildings. Half hopping, half crawling he reached the dimly lighted street. It was almost midnight now and the little town was deserted. At the corner he found a drug-store. It looked warm, companionable, inviting. Drawing his fur-collared overcoat about his ears he hobbled to the door and pushed it open.

Inside two men were leaning against a glass show-case talking with the clerk. At Kenwick's entrance the conversation stopped abruptly like the dialogue of movie actors when the camera clicks the scene's end. The intruder, clutching at one of the show-cases for support, forced a comradely smile. "If I can't put one over here," he told himself, "I don't deserve to be called a fiction-writer."

But before he had time to speak one of the men came forward with a startled questioning. "You look all in, man; white as a sheet. Sit down here. What's the idea?"

"Pretty close call," Kenwick told him. "A fellow in a car bowled me over as I was crossing the street. He went right on, but I doubt if I'll be able to for a while."

"Well, what do you know about that?" the drug clerk challenged, as he helped his visitor into a chair behind the prescription-desk. "Say, this is gettin' to be one of the worst towns on the coast for auto accidents. Didn't get his number, I suppose?"

"No. And I'm just a stranger passing through here. I don't know many people."

"Hard luck." It was evident that the trio were disappointed in the meagerness of his story. One of them stooped and was probing the swollen leg with skilful fingers. Kenwick winced.

"You've got a bad sprain there all right," the doctor told him. "It's swollen a good deal, too, for being so recent. Have you walked far?"

"Yes, rather." Kenwick watched in silence while the physician bound up the injured member in a stout bandage. In spite of his best efforts one sharp moan escaped him.

"Your nerves are badly shaken, I can see that," the doctor decided. "Fix him up a little bromide, Gregson."

Kenwick took the glass, furious to note that it trembled in his hand. The druggist attempted to joke him back to normal poise. "A little more of a jolt and you'd have had to pass him up to Gifford, Doc. Gifford, here," he went on by way of introduction, "is shipping a body north to-night on the twelve-thirty. Bein' two of you, he might have got the railroad to give your folks a special rate if you're goin' his way."

The patient evinced mild interest. "San Francisco?" he inquired. The undertaker nodded.

"That's the train I hoped to make," Kenwick sighed. "But my money seems to have been jolted out of me and——" He went carefully through his pockets as he spoke. And then Gifford came over and stood beside him. "If you don't mind," he began, "I'd like to know your name."

Kenwick's reply was glibly reassuring. "Kenneth Rogers."

"Oh! You that young Rogers that's been visiting for a few days at the Paddington place, 'Utopia'?" It was the doctor who asked this question.

Kenwick nodded warily.

The physician extended his hand. "I'm Markham. Had an engagement to play golf with you out at the country club this afternoon. Awfully sorry you couldn't make it but I got the message all right from your sister that you were having trouble with your car out near Hillside Inn and you couldn't get away."

As Kenwick wrung his hand with easy cordiality there flashed before his mental vision the picture of the wayfarer in goggles. Could a malign fate have trapped him into taking the name of that visitor to Mont-Mer, or any visitor, who might some day arise and challenge him? He had got to get out of this place before the net that the gods were weaving about him should bind him hand and foot.

"Say, listen." Gifford forced himself to the front again, speaking with a mixture of eagerness and hesitation. "If you're goin' up to the city to-night, I wonder if——You see, it's like this. I've got a big masonic funeral on here for Thursday morning. It'll be a hell of a rush for me to get back in time if I have to make this trip. But I promised a little woman that I'd see personally to this shipment; send a responsible party or go myself. I haven't got a soul to send, but if you——."

Kenwick shook his head. "I won't be able to leave now until to-morrow. I'll have to wait and get some money."

Gifford waved aside the objection. "Your expenses will be paid, of course, as mine would have been. I'll advance you the funds. And you don't have to do a thing, you know. Wellman's man will meet the train at the other end. Wait and see the casket in his hands and then you're through."

He watched the other man eagerly. For a moment Kenwick didn't trust himself to meet his gaze. He hoped that he was not betraying in his face the jubilant conviction that his guardian angel had suddenly returned from a vacation and had renewed an interest in him. In order not to appear too eagerly acquiescent he asked casually: "Who is the fellow? Or who was he?"

"Man by the name of Marstan. He wasn't known around here. His wife had to come down from the city to identify him." He glanced at his watch. "There's just about time to make the train now. I've got my car outside. It's luck, your stumbling in here like this. Sheer luck."

"Luck is too mild a word for it," Kenwick assured himself as he crawled into his Pullman a few moments later. "It's providence, old boy. That's what it is."

The bromide had begun to do its work. And his leg, properly bandaged, gave him no pain. Almost hilarious over the knowledge that daylight would find him among familiar surroundings again, he fell into the delicious slumber that follows sudden surcease of mental strain.

When he awoke the train was speeding through the oak-dotted region of San Mateo. He had refused to accept any expense-money from Gifford except enough for his breakfast, and after a cup of coffee in the diner, he sat gazing out of the window, not caring to open conversation with any of his fellow-travelers, completely absorbed in the business of readjusting himself to this environment that he had loved and from which the war had so abruptly uprooted him.

It was glorious to be back again, to catch up the loose threads of the old life. And in spite of the stark bareness of winter, the landscape had never seemed so appealing. The wide level stretches of pasture, cut by ribbons of asphalt, the prosperous little towns which the Coast Company's fast train ignored on its thunderous dash northward, the children walking to school, the pruners waving their shears to him as he sped by—all these breathed a healthy normal living that made the neurotic adventures of the past day seem remote and unreal.

Under the long shed of the Third and Townsend Depot he lingered only until he had carried out Gifford's instructions. Then he went on down the open corridor to the waiting-rooms. Outside the voices of taxi-drivers and hotel busmen made the radiant winter morning hideous with their cries. The waiting-room was warm and bright. There was no better place, Kenwick reflected, to map out his program. The air was a tonic, crisp and tipped with frost. It was too cold to be without an overcoat and yet, if Everett did not make punctual reply to the message that he was about to send, he might have to part with it for a time.

He found a seat in a corner where he would be out of the draft of incessantly opening doors. For in spite of his good night's sleep he felt weak and a little giddy. Resolving to dismiss the past from his mind and concern himself solely with the present was good logic, but difficult of accomplishment. First, and dominating all his thought, was Marcreta Morgan. The thought of her brought him a dull pain. So many letters he had written her since his return to New York, and not one of them had she ever answered. Once, in vague alarm, he had even written to Clinton, but there had been no reply. And then pride had held him silent. So he couldn't go to the house on Pine Street now. He wouldn't go, he decided fiercely, until he had a decent position and had reëstablished himself in civilian life.

Over at the news-stand a girl was fitting picture post-cards into a rack. Kenwick walked over to her and with a part of the change left from his meager breakfast bought a morning paper. While she picked it off the pile he stood twirling the circular rack absently with one hand. The Cliff House, Golden Gate Park, and prominent business blocks whirled past his eyes, but he was not conscious of them. He took his newspaper and turned away.

Halfway to the door he opened it and glanced at the sensational menu spread out for his delectation upon the front page. All at once something inside his brain seemed to crumple up. The Cliff House, Golden Gate Park, and tall office-buildings sped around him in a circle, like a merry-go-round gone mad. Somehow he found his way back to the corner seat and sank into it. And there he sat like a stone man, staring at, but no longer seeing, the front page of his newspaper.

CHAPTER VII

Two hours after Roger Kenwick had taken his gruesome departure from the house of the iron gate, a mud-spattered car turned in at the side entrance to the grounds which he had quitted. The man behind the wheel drove recklessly, careening between the double row of eucalyptus-trees like some low-flying bird of prey seeking its carrion. At the shallow front steps he brought the car to an abrupt halt as though he had found the thing for which he sought. Tugging at his heavy gloves he sprang up the steps, two at a time. "Lord! What a handsome place this is!" he muttered. "What a place for dinners and dancing—and love!"

He pressed the electric button and heard its buzz pierce the stillness of the house. "It's a crime!" He was walking up and down before the closed door, flapping his gloves against his chest. "It's a crime for a man to live in a place like this alone." He pressed the button again, keeping his finger upon it this time until he felt certain that its persistent summons must tear at the nerves of whoever was within. But still there was no response. Then he tried the knob, turned it, and went inside.

The house was in complete darkness. He felt his way along the front hall until his fingers found the switch-button. At the hat-rack he divested himself of his heavy coat, hat, and gloves. The face which the diamond-shaped mirror reflected was dark with disapproval and gathering anger. "Door unlocked at one o'clock at night! Might as well leave a child in charge of things!"

Walking with noisy, impatient tread, he ascended the stairs, taking the left flight on the landing, and snapping on the light in the upper hall. The doors were all closed. He turned the knob of the first one and went in. The sitting-room was in perfect order. He crossed it and entered the alcove beyond. It, too, was in order with fresh linen upon the bed. Having made a tour of the suite he came back and stood beside the center-table in the sitting-room. A half-burned cigar caught his eye, and he drew it out of the ash-tray and turned it speculatively between his fingers. Then, still holding it, he visited the other rooms in the left wing. They were all orderly, silent, deserted. Somewhere in his progress from one to another he dropped the cigar stump and did not notice it. Moving like a man in a dream he found himself at last over in the right wing, standing outside a heavy mahogany door. His movements were no longer speculative. They were nervous and jerky as though propelled by a disabled engine.

He did not at first try to open this door but called in a low uncertain voice that seemed to dread a reply, "Marstan, are you here?" When there was no response he tried the door in a futile sort of way as though he were expecting resistance. When it yielded to his touch and he stood upon the threshold the desolation of the room seemed to leap out at him. He felt no desire to switch on the light here, but stood motionless in the open doorway, transfixed, not by a sight but by an odor.

"Heliotrope!" he muttered at last, and brought the panel shut with a jerk. "Some woman has been in that room!"

For long moments he stood there in the lighted upper hall. In his face bewilderment struggled with alarm. At last he made his way downstairs to the living-room and on to the den. Here he stared long at the half-drawn shades and the crumpled cushions of the window-seat. Something was gone out of that room; something that was a vivid, vital part of it. He couldn't quite determine what it was.

Over in the dining-room he examined the bowl of English walnuts with several empty shells mixed in among them and the nutcrackers lying askew upon the centerpiece. All at once he dropped these with a crash that made an ugly scar upon the polished table-top. His eyes had fallen upon the wide board nailed across the shattered window. He went over and investigated it carefully, his quick eyes taking in every detail of the crude carpentry. Under his touch the sagging lower board suddenly gave way and fell with a heavy thud to the gravel walk below.

The new-comer went back to the front hall, searched for an instant in the pocket of his overcoat, and then, clutching a black cylindrical object, he went out of the house and around on the dining-room side. His hands were trembling now, and the path of light blazing from the little electric torch made a zigzag trail across the dank flower-beds. He found the dislodged board lying with its twisted nails sprawling upward and dragged it off the path. As he dropped it his eyes fell upon an object lying beneath a giant oleander bush. At last he knew what it was that he had missed from the den. It was the Indian blanket. Mystified, he bent down and picked it up, finding it heavy with the added weight of dampness. The next moment he gave a startled cry, dropped the blanket and torch, and staggered back against the wall. And the blackness of night rushed over him like a tidal wave.

But his was the temperament which recuperates quickly from a shock. Resourcefulness, the key-note of his character, impelled him always to seek relief in action. Cursing the sudden weakness in his knees which retarded haste, he strode, with the aid of the recovered torch, toward a small frame cottage in the rear of the garage. Here he rapped sharply upon the closed door, then pushed it open. This room, too, was empty. Pointing the torch, like the unblinking eye of a cyclops, into every corner of the apartment, he made certain of this. Then he drew a solitary chair close to the door and sat down, the torch across his knees.

More slowly now his glance traveled around the room. The blankets upon the bed were in a disheveled heap. There were some soiled dishes upon the table, a cup half full of cold tea, and under the small stove a pot of sticky-looking rice. The fire had gone out. He crossed the room and lifted the lid of the stove. Under the white ashes a few coals glowed dully. There were no clothes in the closet. It was easily apparent to him that the former inmate of the room had left unexpectedly but did not intend to return.

For half an hour he sat there motionless. Then he rose, pushed back the chair, and went out, closing the door behind him. Very deliberately he followed the side path back to the dining-room window. This time he retained the light, pressing one end of it firmly with his thumb. The soggy Indian blanket he folded back, and, stooping close to the ground, examined intently the dead cold face which it had sheltered.

It was the face of a man, young but haggard. The cheeks were sunken, and through the skin of his clenched hands the knuckles showed white and knotted. His hair was in wild disorder, but it seemed more the disorder of long neglect than of violent death. The helpless shrunken figure presented a pitiful contrast to that of the man who knelt beside it.

His was a large, well-proportioned frame that suggested, not corpulence but physical power. His hands were powerful but not thick. His whole bearing was self-assured, almost haughty. But it was the eyes, not the carriage, that gave the impression of arrogance. They were the clearest amber color with a mere dot of black pupil. Here and there tiny specks were visible showing like dark grains of sand in a sea of brown. A woman had once called them "tiger eyes," and he had been pleased. A child had once described them as "freckled" eyes, and he had been annoyed. As he knelt there now, searching the face of the dead man, his eyes, under their drooping lids, narrowed to the merest slits. When at last he rose and drew the blanket back over the still form, he moved with the brisk effectiveness of one animated by definite purpose.

First, he drove the mud-spattered roadster into the garage and left it there beside the beetle-black limousine. Then he let himself into the deserted house again, went up to the second bedroom in the left wing, and began sorting over some miscellaneous objects from one of the chiffonier drawers. "Ghastly!" he muttered once. "Ghastly! I'll have to take something to brace me up."

Back in the dining-room he took one of the long-stemmed glasses from the sideboard and poured himself a drink from a bottle in the cupboard underneath. But first he scrutinized its contents under the light. "Why didn't you take it all?" he inquired sardonically of some invisible being.

For a few hours he slept with a sort of determined tranquillity. But by eight o'clock he was up and dressed, and a few minutes later he answered a summons at the front door. Swinging it open he admitted a short sandy man with the ruddy complexion of the Norsemen. "I'm Annisen, the coroner," this visitor announced.

"Yes. I was expecting you. Come in." The other man swung the portal wider. "Doctor Annisen, is it?"

The visitor nodded and stepped into the hall that was still dim in the cold light of the winter morning. He unwound a black silk muffler from about his throat. "Devilish cold," he commented. "Devilish cold for a place that advertises summer all the year round."

His host smiled with sympathetic appreciation. "California publicity," he commented, "is far and away ahead of anything that we have in the unimaginative East. My furnace-man left me yesterday and I haven't got around to making the fires myself yet. But let me give you something to warm you up, doctor."

While he filled one of the small glasses on the buffet, his guest eyed him stolidly. "Still got some on hand, have you?" he said with a heavy attempt at the amenities. "Well, this wouldn't be a bad place for moonshining out here. Guess you could put almost anything over without fearing a visit from the authorities."

There was a moment of silence. "You've got a beautiful place though," he went on at last. "But Rest Hollow! What a name for it! Rest! Lord! Anything might happen out here, and I guess most everything has. I wasn't much surprised at the message I found waiting me when I got back to town this morning. I've always said that this place fairly yells for a suicide."

The other man's eyes were fixed upon his face with a curious intentness. It was as though he were deaf and were reading the words from his companion's lips. The coroner had raised his glass and was waiting. "No, I don't drink," his host explained. "Very seldom touch anything. I can't and do my kind of work."

Annisen set down his empty glass. "I shouldn't think you could do your kind of work and not drink," he remarked. "Well, let's get this over. I suppose you left everything just as you found it?"

There was the ghost of a smile in his host's eyes. "Glad he didn't put that question the other way around," he was thinking. "It would have been an embarrassment if he had asked if I found everything just as I left it." And then aloud, "Certainly. I haven't touched anything. The body is out here."

"Good. Gifford sent his wagon out last night, but fortunately his man knew enough not to disturb anything until I'd been out. Were you here when he came last night?"

"No. I didn't get here till later."

The two men crawled out through the broken window and in the gray light of the November morning knelt together beside the still form under the Indian blanket. Mechanically the coroner examined it and the empty revolver which they discovered a few feet away. But he offered no comment until he had finished. Then his verdict was curt. "Gunshot wound in the head, self-inflicted. When did this happen?" He took out a small book and noted down the answers to this and a variety of other questions. Then he stood for a moment staring down at the white, drawn face of the dead man.

"Young, too," he murmured. "But I suppose it's a merciful thing. There was no life ahead for him, poor devil."

They followed the path around to the front of the house where Annisen's car was waiting. "Be in to the inquest about two o'clock this afternoon," he instructed. "That hour suit you all right, Mr.——? Don't believe I know your name."

"Glover. Richard Glover. I'll be there at two, doctor."

Late that morning the hearse made its second trip out of the side entrance of Rest Hollow. A mud-splashed roadster followed it. The cortège had just passed the last gaunt eucalyptus-tree and turned out upon the public highway when it was halted. A man in heavy-rimmed goggles got out of his car and made his way across the road. His glance wavered uncertainly between the driver of the hearse and the man in the muddy roadster. He decided to address the latter.

"I heard the news last night. It got around the neighborhood. But I thought——I didn't know——Those rumors get started sometimes with no foundation of fact. But it's true then—that he is dead."

"That who is dead?"

The question seemed to be shot back at him. And he had the uncanny conviction that it emanated, not from the lips, but from the amber eyes of the man in the roadster. He stammered out his reply.

"Why—I think his name——He told me his name was Kenwick; Roger Kenwick, I think."

The roadster started again. "Yes, that's the name. Did you know him?"

"No. But wait a minute, please." The goggle-eyed man hurried back to his own car and returned with a handsome spray of white chrysanthemums. They were tied with a broad white ribbon bordered with heliotrope. "I'd like to have you take these if you will." He handed them up to the hearse-driver.

The man in the roadster fired another question. "Your name, please?"

"They are not from me. One of the ladies in the neighborhood sent them. She felt it was too sad—having him go away this way, all alone." He went back to his machine and was soon lost in the distance. And the funeral procession proceeded on its way to Mont-Mer.

The coroner's inquest was brief and perfunctory. Annisen was on the eve of retiring from office and seeking a more lucrative position in a Middle Western city where the inhabitants, as he contemptuously remarked, "were not afflicted like this place is with a chronic sleeping-sickness."

The jury returned the verdict that "the deceased came to his death by shooting himself in the head." After they had departed, Gifford held brief parley with the chief witness. "I suppose you'll attend to notifying the family?"

Richard Glover nodded. And at his direction the haggard body was removed from the cheap black coffin in which it had made the trip from Rest Hollow. Following Richard Glover's instructions, it was embalmed for the trip across the continent. But just as it was ready for the long journey, he announced to Gifford that he had received orders from the family to inter the body in the little cemetery of Mont-Mer. And so, on the following day, it was taken to the quiet resting-place overlooking the sea. In the presence of no one except the undertaker's assistants and Richard Glover there was lowered into the lonely grave a handsome gray casket with silver handles and a frosted silver plate on which was inscribed the name "Roger Kenwick."

CHAPTER VIII

The editor of the "San Francisco Clarion" tilted his chair far back and look quizzically at the young man sitting beside his desk. "Sure I remember you," he remarked. "Did some Sunday work for us some time ago, didn't you?"

"Yes, a little feature stuff when I was in college."

"And now you want to go it strong, eh? Well, we've been rather disorganized in here since the war. There's been a constant stream of reporters coming and going. But things are settling down a little now and we're not taking on anybody who doesn't want to stick. Planning to be in the city right along, are you?"

"Well, I'll be perfectly frank with you about that. I'm not. I've got to go East as soon as I get a little money. But I'm not planning to stay there. I'm coming back for good as soon as I've closed up my business."

"Why not close up the Eastern business first?"

"Can't. It's not ripe yet." There was a note of grimness in the young man's voice. "I don't know just when it will be, either. But when I do go back, I don't think it will take me long to finish it. Don't give me a reporter's job if I don't look good to you. Put me on to some feature stuff for a while."

"All right. Sit in, and I'll give you a line on a few things I'd like to have hunted down."

When he left the office half an hour later, Kenwick sought the public library. There he spent the entire afternoon and a part of the evening. It was about nine o'clock when he entered the St. Germaine, a modest hotel in the uptown district. The night clerk cast an inquiring glance in search of his suit-case.

"My baggage hasn't come yet," the prospective guest explained tranquilly. "It may be in to-morrow. If you want to know anything about me, call Allen Boyer at the 'Clarion' office."

When he had been shown to his room on the fifth floor he lighted the lamp on the stand near his bed and became absorbed in the contents of one of the weekly magazines. He read until very late and then snapped out the light, cursing himself for having abused his eyes on the eve of taking a new position.

The next morning he was out early, eager to hunt down one of the stories that Boyer had suggested. As he swung out into the exhilaration of the crisp November morning on the scent of an assignment some of the old self-assurance and buoyancy came back to him.

Half an hour after he had left the hotel, the revolving doors swung round the circle to admit a man with prosperous leather suit-case and "freckled" eyes. The day clerk handed him a pen and registration-slip. He was beginning to sign, after a curt question about the rates, when the blond cashier, perched on a stool in the wire cage adjoining the desk, pushed a similar slip of paper toward the clerk. "Can't quite make out that name," she confessed. "Looks like Renwich. Do you get it?"

The desk official glanced at it with the casually professional air of one to whom all the mysteries of chirography are as an open book. "It's Kenwick. Plain as day—Roger Kenwick."

The pen slid from the fingers of the man on the other side of the desk. For a moment, self-possession deserted Richard Glover. He stood there staring hard at the ugly blot which he had made across his own signature. Then he crumpled the bit of paper, threw it into the waste-basket, and, suit-case in hand, went out into the street.

The day clerk darted a contemptuous glance after his disappearing figure. "Some nut," he remarked. "Told me the terms were all right and then got cold feet. I'll bet he's a crook."

"Sure he's a crook." The blond cashier spoke with cheerful authority. "I could have told you that when he first came in. I can size 'em up as far off as the front door. And I had him posted on the 'Losses by Default' page before he'd set down his bag."

The day clerk regarded her musingly. "He had a bag, though, and that's more than this Kenwick fellow showed. But Brown thought he was all right and let him have 526. Did you notice him this morning? Tall, dark fellow, young but with hair a little gray around the temples."

"Ye-a. High-brow. Looks like he was here for his health. Probably broke down in some government job."

"No, he's a newspaper man."

"Let's see where he's from?" She reached for the slip.

"New York. Well, I slipped a cog. I would have said he was a Westerner."

"That's right. That last chap looked more like New York to me. But you never can tell. And something seemed to hit him all wrong about this place."

With this conclusion Richard Glover was in complete accord. As he walked down Geary Street clutching his heavy bag, he was conscious with every nerve of his being that something had struck him decidedly wrong about the St. Germaine. "It might be just a coincidence," he reassured himself. "It's undoubtedly just a coincidence but—but that isn't such a very common name. My God! I begin to feel like a spy caught in his own trap."

With scarcely more than a glance at the name above the entrance he turned into the lobby of another hotel and signed for a room. It was almost noon when he appeared again and wrote a letter at one of the lobby desks. It was not a long letter, hardly more than a note, but its composition consumed almost an hour and a half a dozen sheets of stationery, which were successively torn to bits and thrown into the waste-basket. And then at last the final sheet met the same fate and Richard Glover sat tapping the desk softly with the edge of the blotter.

"No, I won't write; I'll just go," he decided. "For asking if I may come almost invites a refusal. And then it takes longer. I'll go up there this afternoon. The secret of getting what you want out of people is to take them off guard."

Following this policy he set out in the late afternoon to pay a call. At the door of the uptown address he was met by a colored maid. She offered him neither hope nor despair but agreed to present his card.

And in front of the living-room fire Marcreta Morgan read the card and flicked it across to her brother. "I don't think I care to see anybody to-day," she said. "It's your first night at home, and there's so much to talk about."

"Don't know him," Clinton decided. "Somebody you met while I was away?"

"Oh, yes, you know him, Clint. You introduced me to him yourself. Don't you remember he came here one night before you went to Washington and asked you to analyze some specimens of mineral water."

"Oh, that fellow! Has he been hanging around here ever since?"

"Well, no. I can't say that he has hung around exactly. But of late he has called rather often. He's really quite entertaining in some ways. You were very much interested in his specimens."

"In his specimens, yes."

It may have been that she resented his implied dislike. It may have been for some other reason. But Marcreta suddenly reversed her decision. "Show him in, please," she ordered. And the next moment the visitor stood in the doorway.

It was apparent as he crossed the long room that he had not expected to meet any one save his hostess. But he responded warmly to Clinton's handshake and drew up a chair for himself opposite Marcreta. "It's a pleasant surprise to find you here, Mr. Morgan," he said. "I thought you were still in the service at Washington. But it's time for every one to be getting home now, isn't it?"

Clinton Morgan surveyed him silently. It struck him that his guest was very much at home himself. For a time the conversation followed that level, triangular form of talk which so effectually conceals purpose and personality. Then Clinton excused himself on the plea that he had some unpacking to do, and Marcreta and Richard Glover were left alone.

"It's been a long time since I've seen you, Mr. Glover," she said. "You haven't been in the Bay region lately?"

"No, I've not been able to get away." His tone indicated that he had chafed under this pressure of adverse circumstance. "But it's good to get back now," he went on. "I'm always glad to get back—here."

She ignored the new ardent note in his voice. "But the southern part of the State is beautiful," she said. "Mont-Mer, particularly, is so beautiful that it makes the soul ache."

The words seemed to startle him. His eyes left the camouflaged log of wood in the fireplace and fixed themselves steadily upon her. "How do you know? How do you, San Francisco-bound, know?"

"I have just returned from there. My brother and I arrived home the same day. I spent a week near Mont-Mer visiting my friends, the Paddingtons. Do you know them?"

"No. But I think I know their home. They call it 'Utopia,' I believe?"