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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 40416 ***
+
+                            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?"
+
+"Yes. And until I saw it I had always thought that Utopia was a myth."
+
+"Mont-Mer," he mused, "does look rather like a fairy-story come true,
+doesn't it? There's something perilously seductive about it. It's a
+place where people go to forget."
+
+"I have heard that said about it, but somehow it didn't make that kind
+of an appeal to me. I had the feeling that in such a place as that every
+sorrow of life is a bleeding wound. There's a terrible cruelty about
+that tropical sort of beauty. It drives memories in, not out."
+
+For some unaccountable reason the tensity of her tone annoyed him. "You
+didn't like it then?"
+
+"It's beautiful, as I have said, but--I shall never go there again."
+
+"The place you ought to see," he told her, "is Cedargrove, about two
+hours' trip to the south."
+
+"That's where the mineral springs are?"
+
+"Yes. And what I really came to tell you to-day is that I've bought the
+controlling interest in the springs. It was after your brother had given
+me his final analysis of the water last year that I decided to do it. He
+said, you know, that in his opinion the medicinal ingredients equaled
+that of the waters of Carlsbad. I've made great plans. You see, there
+are twenty acres, and so far we've found eighteen springs. We've been
+bottling the stuff for several months now and it's selling like hot
+cakes. The next step is a hotel. It's not to be too colossal, but unique
+in every respect. That's what takes in California. Show people that
+you've got 'something different' and they'll jump to the conclusion that
+because it's different it must be desirable. That's America. I've had
+other chemists besides your brother tell me that the water is wonderful.
+The best doctors in the South declare that those springs are a bigger
+find than a gold mine."
+
+He had warmed to his theme now and his amber eyes glowed. And she
+followed his words with that quick responsiveness that was all
+unconsciously one of her chief charms. "And what are your advertising
+plans?" she asked.
+
+It was like a fresh supply of gasolene to an engine. He plunged into
+stupendous plans for a publicity campaign. "I'm doing most of the copy
+work myself so far. I love the advertising game. I love telling people
+what they want and making them want it. I'm calling it 'The Carlsbad of
+America.' That will get the health-seekers, and health-seekers will pay
+any price."
+
+For half an hour he talked, going into every detail of his plan. And
+then all at once he stopped abruptly as though he had grown suddenly
+weary of Carlsbad. She sat gazing into the fire, waiting in sympathetic
+silence, for him to resume the subject. But he didn't resume it. When he
+spoke again, his tone had changed as well as his theme. For the first
+time the conversation became keenly personal. He talked about himself
+with a humility that was quite new and, to his listener, somewhat
+startling.
+
+"I don't think it can be a complete surprise to you," he said, "to know
+how much I need you; how much I depend upon your sympathy and
+understanding. You must have guessed something of my feeling. You are
+too intuitive not to have guessed."
+
+Her frank, blue-gray eyes were fixed upon him with an expression that
+baffled him, yet gave him hope. "No, it is not quite unexpected," she
+admitted. "But I didn't realize that it had gone quite so far. It seems
+to have all happened rather suddenly. We haven't known each other very
+long; not nearly long enough for anything like this."
+
+"No. But I've been looking for you all my life. That ought to count for
+something."
+
+"For something--yes. But not for so much as--that."
+
+"Love isn't a matter of time," he told her.
+
+"No. But it's a matter of exploration. It's a matter of finding each
+other. And in the half a dozen times that you have called here, Mr.
+Glover, we haven't talked about the finding kind of things. No, we don't
+know each other. We don't know each other half well enough to consider
+anything like this."
+
+"But we can get to know each other better. Is there any reason why we
+should not do that?"
+
+She pondered this for a moment. "Well, for one thing, there is
+distance."
+
+"There is no longer distance," he pleaded eagerly. "For I have severed
+my connections with Mont-Mer."
+
+"Oh!" He couldn't tell whether the exclamation emanated from pleasure or
+merely surprise. "You severed your connections there because of this new
+Carlsbad plan?"
+
+"Partly because of that. But chiefly because a secretaryship to a rich
+man doesn't get one anywhere."
+
+"I suppose not."
+
+Still he couldn't decide whether her interest now was genuine or only
+courteous. But she would give him no further encouragement than to allow
+him to call occasionally. And with this permission he went away well
+content.
+
+Ten minutes after he heard the front door close, Clinton, in a
+dressing-gown and slippers, appeared on the threshold of his sister's
+room. "Gone, at last?" he queried. "What's Glover doing up here anyway?
+I thought he was securely anchored with a millionaire hermit down
+South."
+
+She spoke without turning from the dressing-table where she was shaking
+her long dark hair down over an amethyst-colored negligée. "You don't
+like him, do you?"
+
+"No, I can't say that I do."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+Before the directness of the question he felt suddenly shamefaced, as a
+man always does who condemns one of his own sex before a woman on
+insufficient evidence. "Oh, he's all right, of course. I have no reason
+really for disliking the fellow, except----Well, he seems to like you
+too much. And he's not your style. What did he want to-night?"
+
+"He wanted to tell me about a new scheme he has, a really wonderful
+enterprise, Clint, for turning that mineral water place into a
+health-resort. He's taken over most of the stock and he talked glowingly
+about it."
+
+"He does talk well; I'll admit that. But who is going to capitalize this
+venture?"
+
+His sister smiled. "Well, Clinton, I could hardly ask him that, you
+know."
+
+"No, I suppose not. And if you had, I imagine that he would hardly have
+liked to answer it. Anyhow, he's cheered you up, and I ought to be
+grateful to him for that. It was a mistake for you to take that trip to
+Mont-Mer, Crete. It was too much for you."
+
+She made no response to this, and her brother, noting the delicately
+flushed face and languid movements, told himself reproachfully that the
+mistake was in going away and leaving her to struggle alone with the
+hospital venture. He sat down on a cedar chest beside the window.
+
+"Let's retint the whole lower floor, Crete," he suggested, seizing upon
+the first change of topic that offered itself. "Now that this place is
+to be a home again and not a sanitarium, let's retint and get the public
+institution smell out of it."
+
+She laid down the ivory brush and turned to him. But her gaze was
+abstracted, and when she spoke in a musing voice, her words showed that
+she had not been listening. "Clinton, have you ever figured out just how
+much of the Coalinga oil stock belongs to me?"
+
+He had been sitting with one knee hugged between his arms. Now he
+released it and brought himself upright upon the cedar chest.
+
+"Why, no, I haven't. I don't think it makes much difference, while we're
+living together, sharing everything this way."
+
+She got up from the dressing-table and walked over to the far window,
+drawing the deep lace collar of the amethyst negligée up about her ears
+as though to screen herself from his view. Out on the bay the lighted
+ferry-boats plied their silent passage, and on the Key Route pier an
+orange-colored train crawled cautiously, like a brilliant caterpillar,
+across a thread of track. Marcreta, gazing out into the clear soft dusk,
+sent a question backward over her shoulder.
+
+"Would it be very much trouble to go over our properties some time
+and--make a division?"
+
+"No, it wouldn't be much trouble, and I suppose it would be much more
+businesslike." He spoke briskly but she knew that her demand had
+astonished him. "You know," he admitted ruefully, "I don't pretend to be
+much of a business man. I think you may be right to insist upon an
+accounting."
+
+"O Clint! I don't mean that. You know I don't mean that." Her voice held
+the stricken tone of the sensitive nature stabbed by the swift
+realization that it has hurt some one else. "You've been the best
+brother a girl ever had. You've been too good to me. I didn't mean
+_that_ at all."
+
+"What do you mean then, Crete?"
+
+Her answer seemed to grope its way through an underbrush of tangled
+emotions. "I just thought it would be well for us each to know what we
+have because--you see, we may not always be living together like this."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+A month had passed since Kenwick became a member of the staff of the
+"San Francisco Clarion." The work had been going well, and the perpetual
+small excitement of a newspaper office brought back some of the old
+thrill that he had known in his college days. But every emotion came in
+subdued form now. There was a shadow across his sky, a soft pedal
+applied to every emotion. And until this was lifted he resolved to deny
+himself a sight of the house on Pine Street.
+
+But during the beginning of his fifth week in the city desire overcame
+pride and caution, and late one night he walked up the familiar hill and
+looked into one of the lighted windows. There was no one in the room and
+the furniture and floors were covered with heavy canvas sheeting
+spattered with calcimine. An ugly step-ladder stood directly in front of
+the window, partly obstructing his view. He was about to turn away in
+bleak despair when the glitter of some small object in a far corner of
+the room caught his eye. Peering more intently under the half-drawn
+shade he saw that the gleaming thing was a small tinsel ball suspended
+from the lowest branch of a tiny Christmas-tree. It was almost New
+Year's day now, and the little fir with its brave showing of gilt and
+silver had been relegated to a distant corner to make way for the
+aggressive progress of the painters. The man at the window, staring in
+from the darkness at the drooping glory of the little tree, felt for it
+a sudden sense of kinship. And the Christmas-tree stared back at him
+with an inarticulate sort of questioning. There was to Kenwick a
+terrible sort of patience in its attitude. Torn away from its normal
+environment, transplanted suddenly and without warning into surroundings
+giddily artificial, and bereft of the roots with which to explore them,
+the little fir-tree stood there, holding in its out-stretched arms the
+baubles of an unfamiliar and irrelevant existence. He turned away,
+maddened by a fury that he did not comprehend. "Anything but that!" he
+cried savagely. "Anything but the patience of hopelessness!"
+
+His thoughts were in a whirl, and he was unconscious of the fact that he
+was almost running down the slanting pavement. When he became aware of
+it he slackened his pace abruptly. He was a fool, he told himself.
+"Anybody watching me would size me up for an escaped convict--prowling
+around doorsteps at night; sneaking up to windows, like a professional
+burglar looking over his territory."
+
+He let himself into his room at the St. Germaine and snapped on the
+light. The first thing his eyes fell upon in the bare, prim chamber was
+a letter propped against his mirror. It was a yellow envelope and it
+bore the dull black insignia of the dead-letter office. There was
+something ominous-looking about it. There is always something ominous
+about that pale yellow, unstamped envelope that issues, unheralded and
+unwanted, from the cemetery of letters. Inside of it was a communication
+written upon the St. Germaine stationery and addressed in his own
+handwriting to his brother, Everett Kenwick. It had been opened and
+sealed again, and across one end something was written. The single word
+seemed to leap out at Kenwick with the brutal unexpectedness of a bomb.
+He dropped the envelope as though it had stung him and stood gazing down
+at it. It stared malignantly back at him, burning a fiery path to his
+brain. Up and down the room he strode muttering over and over to himself
+that one horrible word: "Deceased! Deceased!"
+
+The walls of the room seemed to be coming closer and closer. He felt as
+if he were being smothered. Taking his hat he went out into the hall,
+and walked down the five flights of stairs rather than encounter the
+elevator-boy. On the way down he decided to send a telegram of inquiry
+to the family lawyer in New York. The indelible pencil handed to him by
+the girl in the little hotel booth seemed to write the message quite of
+its own accord. And there was a calming sort of comfort in the
+impersonal manner of the telegraph-operator herself as she counted off
+mechanically the frantic words of his query.
+
+As he turned away he was conscious of only one impulse; to be with
+somebody. He must have companionship of some sort, any sort, or he would
+lose his reason. From the dining-room there drifted out to him the
+pleasant din of human voices. He made his way inside and followed the
+head-waiter to his accustomed seat beside one of the mirror walls.
+
+The hotel dining-room was full that evening. There was an Elks'
+convention in the city and the lobby swarmed with delegates. At his
+table Kenwick found three other men, and was pathetically grateful for
+their comradeship. Two of them were from Sacramento. The third
+introduced himself as Granville Jarvis, late of New Orleans. Kenwick
+remembered having seen him several times about the hotel. He had that
+quiet, magnetic sort of personality that never comes quite halfway to
+meet the casual acquaintance, but that possesses a subtle, indefinable
+power that lures others across the intervening territory. "I have
+something for you," Granville Jarvis seemed to say. "I have something
+that I'll be glad to give you--if you care to come and get it."
+
+The other men talked volubly, including the quartet in their random
+conversation. Jarvis was an appreciative listener, an unmistakable
+cosmopolite, whose occasional contributions to the table-talk were
+keen-edged and subtly humorous. In his speech lingered only a faint
+trace of the Southern drawl. Of the three men, his was the personality
+which attracted Kenwick. The two Elks finished their dessert hurriedly
+and left before the coffee was served. Then Granville Jarvis, glancing
+at the haggard face of the young man across the table, ventured the
+first personal remark of the hour. "You've scarcely eaten a thing, and
+you look all in. I don't want to intrude into your affairs, but is there
+anything I can do?"
+
+It was that unexpected kindliness that always proves too much for
+overstrung nerves. "I've just had bad news," Kenwick admitted. "It's
+rather shaken me up. But you can't do anything, thanks."
+
+"Better take a walk out in the fresh air," Jarvis suggested. "I know how
+you feel. It's beastly--when a man is all alone."
+
+"I am alone; that's the damnable part of it. And I've got to somehow get
+through the night."
+
+The other man nodded with silent comprehension. "I'll take a stroll with
+you if you like, and you don't have to talk."
+
+Kenwick accepted the offer eagerly, and for an hour he and his companion
+walked almost in silence. Then Kenwick, still haunted by the specter of
+solitude, invited the New Orleans man up to his room. There stretched
+out comfortably in two deep chairs, with an ash-tray between them, they
+discussed politics, books, and New York. "It's my home town," Kenwick
+explained, "but I'm a Westerner by adoption. They say, 'Once a New
+Yorker, always a New Yorker,' but it hasn't worked that way with me."
+
+Jarvis smiled. "They say that about Emporia, Kansas, too, and about all
+the other towns ranging in between. It's a world-wide colloquialism.
+Don't you go back to visit, though?"
+
+"I've been thinking of it," his host replied. And then, despite the
+fact that his guest was a complete stranger, perhaps because of that
+fact, he felt an overwhelming desire to tell him of his trouble. For
+there is a certain security in confiding a sorrow to a casual stranger.
+Every care-ridden person in the world has felt the impulse, has been
+impelled to it by the realization that there is safety in remoteness.
+You will never see the stranger again, or if you do, he will have
+forgotten you and your trouble. A transitory interest has its
+advantages. It demands nothing in the way of a sequel. It keeps no watch
+upon your struggle; it demands no final reckoning. You and your agony
+are to the chance acquaintance a short-story, not a serial.
+
+Jarvis was leaning back in his deep chair, one leg dangling carelessly
+over the broad arm. His eye-glasses, rimmed with the thinnest thread of
+tortoise-shell, gave him a certain intellectuality. Although he was
+still in the early thirties there were deep lines about his mouth. He
+had lived, Kenwick decided. And having lived, he must know something
+about life. Jarvis glanced up suddenly and met his gaze.
+
+"Funny thing, my being here, isn't it?" he said. "Up here in your room,
+smoking your cigars, sprawling over your furniture as though I'd known
+you always instead of being the merest chance acquaintance."
+
+Mashing the gray end of his cigar into the ash-tray Kenwick made
+slow-toned response. "I don't think it's curious. I don't think it's
+curious at all because as I look back on my life all the vital things in
+it have had casual beginnings. I have a steadily increasing respect for
+the small emergencies of life. Whenever I carefully set my stage for
+some dramatic event it's sure to turn out a thin affair. The best scenes
+are those which are impromptu and carry their own properties."
+
+"That's flattering to a chance acquaintance, but a hard knock at your
+friends."
+
+"I'm all for chance acquaintances," Kenwick responded. "Friends have an
+uncomfortable habit of failing to show up at the moment of crisis. Just
+when you're terribly in need of them, they fall sick or get absorbed in
+building a new house, or go to Argentina. And then, before you have time
+to grow cynical, along comes somebody that you just bow to on the
+street, and he sees you are in trouble and offers a lift. The people who
+really owe you something, never pay. They pass the buck to the chance
+acquaintance, and nine times out of ten he makes good. Makes things
+more interesting that way. After all, life isn't merely a system of
+bookkeeping."
+
+Kenwick prided himself upon the fact that he had kept the bitterness out
+of his voice, but when Jarvis spoke, this illusion was shattered. "Tough
+luck, Mr. Kenwick. As I said before, I don't want to horn in, but I'd be
+glad to score another point for the C. A. if it would be of any help to
+you, and there's nobody else about."
+
+Kenwick put down his cigar. "To tell the truth, there's nobody about at
+all. It happens that during the past year every friend I had has gone,
+figuratively speaking, to Argentina. Some of them used to be
+particularly good at helping me out with my yarns. I'm a fiction-writer,
+you know, and I'm under contract to finish a mystery-story for one of
+the magazines. I'm stuck, and it's bothering me a lot. Can't move the
+thing a peg. I know that the man who talks about his own stories is as
+much of a pest as the man who tells his dreams but if----"
+
+Jarvis had settled down into his chair with a sigh of luxurious content.
+"Shoot," he commanded. "It's great stuff being talked to when I'm not
+expected to make any replies. What's the name of it?"
+
+"It hasn't any name just yet, but I'll let you be godfather at the
+christening. This is just a scenario of the situation, with all the
+color and atmosphere left out." He reached over and snapped off the
+chandelier light, leaving only the soft glow from the little brass lamp
+upon the table.
+
+"The story," he began when he had resumed his seat, "hinges upon the
+fortunes of two brothers--or rather the fortunes of one and the
+misfortunes of the other. The parents die when the elder of the two is
+thirty and the younger almost nineteen. The older brother has married,
+and at the death of his mother comes back with his wife, to live at the
+old home. But the sister-in-law and younger brother are not congenial,
+and the boy, who has ambitions for a professional training decides to go
+away from home to a distant university. There is very little opposition
+to the plan. For the sister-in-law is in favor of it, and the elder
+brother (who is guardian, of course, and a splendid fellow) consents on
+the condition that the boy spend his summer vacations at home. He hopes
+in this way to keep in touch with him and does.
+
+"In the spring of his senior year, America enters the war, and the boy,
+now a man of twenty-three, enlists and in the autumn gets across. He
+sees more than six months of action at the front without getting a
+scratch. But at the end of that time his nerves go to pieces and he is
+sent first to a convalescent hospital in England and then home. There he
+finds the old place completely changed under his sister-in-law's régime
+and he is so obviously unhappy about it that his brother suggests that
+he accept the invitation of an old family friend and spend the winter
+with him in his California home. He complies with this plan, the more
+eagerly because it gives him an excuse to get back to the environment
+which he has grown to love and the associates that he knew in his
+college days.
+
+"Without adventure he arrives at the little southern California town,
+and is met at the depot by his friend's chauffeur. But on the way out to
+the house they meet with an automobile accident that shakes him up
+pretty badly and, so far as he can determine from circumstantial
+evidence, kills the driver. Stranded alone and injured in an unfamiliar
+village, he applies at the first house he comes to for aid. It chances
+to be one of those palatial country homes, so plentiful in that region,
+which seems to have been built for the exclusive use of caretakers. For
+although it is completely and elegantly furnished and bears every
+evidence of being tenanted he stays there ill for more than twenty-four
+hours, absolutely alone except for the presence of a mysterious woman
+who is apparently locked into one of the bedrooms upstairs, and whom he
+never sees.
+
+"On the second night he makes a surreptitious escape from this uncanny
+prison, without ever having encountered its owner, and by a happy stroke
+of chance, makes his way up the coast to San Francisco. Here he plans to
+establish himself permanently, look up some of his old associates, and
+get in touch with life again. But this scheme is thwarted in a most
+unexpected manner. For on the morning of his arrival something happens
+that makes chaos of his plans and starts him upon a quest, not into the
+future, but into the past. In the station depot he stops long enough to
+purchase a newspaper, and----"
+
+Kenwick paused for an instant and glanced at his auditor.
+
+"Go on," Jarvis commanded with that impatient curtness that is the best
+assurance of interest.
+
+"He buys a newspaper," the narrator went on. "And from the date on it he
+learns that instead of having lost connection with the world for two
+days, he has been out of it for almost a year. There are ten months of
+his life that he can't account for at all.
+
+"At the library he reads up and discovers that the war is over. From the
+newspapers and magazines he picks up the thread of world events and
+orients himself with regard to national and local affairs. But to
+connect his own past and present proves, as you may suspect, an almost
+hopeless task. He sends several telegrams to his own home, all of which
+are ignored. A letter to his brother brings, after long delay, the
+startling information that he is dead. The message bowls him over
+completely. And the more the thing preys upon his mind the more certain
+he is that there has been foul play. He begins to be haunted by the
+conviction that he is being watched. The only safe course open to him
+seems to be to lead as normal and inconspicuous an existence as possible
+until he can hear from the family lawyer."
+
+Kenwick broke off suddenly and reached for the ash-tray. "Well," he
+said, "what do you think of it?"
+
+Jarvis stirred in his chair. When he spoke he appeared to be returning
+rather breathlessly from a long distance. "Great stuff," he commented.
+"It seems to have all the ingredients for a best-seller, except one."
+
+"What's that?"
+
+"Well, I don't pose as a critic of literature. But judging from the
+novels I've read I should say that the thing it lacks is romance. The
+poor devil ought to be in love with somebody, or somebody ought to be in
+love with him."
+
+Kenwick's face stiffened. It was apparent that he had not expected this
+criticism. And he found himself envying those people who can discuss
+their love affairs. But not to his best friend could he have mentioned
+Marcreta Morgan's name. "I told you I was just giving you a scenario of
+this thing," he reminded his critic. "I'll work up that part of it
+later. As a matter of fact there is a woman in it. He proposed to her
+before he went into the service and she rejected him."
+
+"And he didn't look her up afterward?"
+
+"Well, he could hardly do that, not until he had accounted for himself.
+And especially as she had shown no interest in him whatever while he was
+away."
+
+"You never can tell about a woman, though. The fact that he had come
+back a pariah and was in trouble might arouse her love."
+
+"No, not her love; her pity perhaps."
+
+"Well, I won't argue with an author. They are supposed to be authorities
+on such questions. Go on with the thing. Where _had_ the chap been
+during those ten months?"
+
+"I haven't the least idea."
+
+Jarvis brought himself upright. "Why, you outrageous devil!" he cried.
+"Getting me all worked up over a story that you can't see the end of
+yourself! And how about the family estate? What became of that?"
+
+"I haven't finished plotting the thing yet. That's why I told it to you.
+If I had solved all its problems it wouldn't have been necessary to
+inflict it upon you."
+
+His guest rose and stretched himself. "Well, I'm afraid I wasn't much
+help," he said ruefully. "Fact is, I haven't any creative imagination at
+all. I'm the kind of reader that writers of detective yarns love. I'll
+swallow anything that's got a little salt on it, and I never guess right
+about the ending."
+
+He fumbled in an inside pocket of his coat and drew out a card. "I'd
+like to have you return this call some time, Mr. Kenwick. I'm not far
+away from you, just two blocks around the corner in the Hartshire
+Building. If you care anything for photography, drop around some time
+and I'll show you some interesting pictures. They are a harmless hobby
+of mine. I fuss around in a laboratory over there most of the time, and
+when I'm not there I'm in the dark room."
+
+Kenwick promised to come, and a moment later Granville Jarvis was gone.
+Bereft of his sympathetic presence the room seemed overpowering in its
+gaunt emptiness. The last two hours of genial companionship were swept
+aside as ruthlessly as though they had never been, and Kenwick found
+himself back again at that ghastly moment when he had torn open the
+yellow envelope. For he was to learn, in the crucial school of
+experience, that the sorrow of bereavement is not a permanently
+engulfing flood, but that it comes in waves, ebbing away under the
+pressure of objective living only to gather volume for a renewed attack.
+And in the moment that its victim recovers a staggering strength, it is
+upon him again, sweeping aside in one crashing moment the pitiful
+defenses of philosophy and faith which the soul has constructed to save
+itself from shipwreck.
+
+Until after midnight Kenwick sat at the window waiting for a summons
+from the telephone. Then he went to bed and fell into a listening sort
+of sleep. But not during that night nor in the days that followed was
+there any response to his telegram.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+It was on the morning after his conversation with Jarvis that Boyer, of
+the "Clarion," summoned Kenwick into his office. "Got a story here that
+I'd like to have you hunt down," he said, and pushed a clipping across
+the table. Kenwick read it with an interest that was painfully forced.
+It was cut from one of the local evening papers and was a rather
+colorless account of the spectacular achievements of one of the city's
+trance mediums. He noted down the address and rose with a hint of
+weariness.
+
+"The thing that makes her different from the others and worth a trip out
+there," his employer explained, "is that Professor Drew of the
+psychology department over at the university has set himself the task of
+showing her up. She has done some rather dramatic things that have got
+on his nerves and the other day he gave a lecture on her methods before
+his abnormal psychology class and had the place packed. She has just
+written a book too; bizarre sort of thing called the 'Rent Veil' or the
+'Torn Scarf' or something like that. It ran in the 'Record' about two
+months ago and they made a big hit with it."
+
+He leaned back in his chair and surveyed Kenwick speculatively. "What do
+you make of it?" he asked. "This stupendous revival of interest in the
+supernatural? Some of our greatest writers devoting themselves to
+spirit-writing; some of our best citizens declaring that they get
+comfort and inspiration out of the ouija-board and planchette?"
+
+"I think," Kenwick answered slowly, "that it is one of the inevitable
+results of the war. It has caused a big upheaval in the spiritual as
+well as the economic world. And one of the things that it has brought to
+the surface is death. Of course death has always been with us but unless
+it came right into our own lives we have persistently ignored it, as we
+have ignored the industrial problems and immigration and a lot of other
+things. But during the last few years death has been rampant. Everybody
+has had to look at it from a greater or less distance. For awhile we'll
+have to go on looking at it. And human nature is so constituted that it
+has only two alternatives. It must either ignore things or try to
+account for them. I don't think this renaissance of the supernatural is
+anything unusual. Every great war must have been followed by a frenzied
+season of accounting for death."
+
+The other man glanced at him with eyes in which there was no longer
+impersonal speculation. "You've been touched by it too, Kenwick?" he
+ventured.
+
+"Yes. My brother."
+
+"I'm sorry." He stretched out a hand. "Well, to get back to this Madame
+Rosalie; get an interview with her and also with Drew. We'll give 'em
+each a column on Sunday. We might be able to start a controversy that
+would be worth while."
+
+And so, half an hour later, Kenwick was ringing the door-bell at a
+shabby old house on Fillmore Street. As he stood there waiting he was
+convinced that his only motive for the errand was a journalistic
+interest. But if there is any season of life when the sane well-balanced
+man or woman may be tempted into the region of the occult it is during
+that interval between the shock of bereavement and readjustment to an
+altered order of existence when the soul quivers upon the brink of two
+worlds. The lapse of time between shock and readjustment varies with
+every temperament, but in that period of helpless groping we all stand
+close to the psychic, the unexplainable, the supernatural.
+
+If Kenwick had expected to find Madame Rosalie's domain extraordinary in
+any particular, he was distinctly disappointed. It was one of those ugly
+old frame houses with protruding bay-windows which still weather
+competition with the concrete and stucco residences in every part of the
+city. In the front basement window was the hideous sign of a
+dry-cleaning establishment, and in the neighboring flat the windows were
+placarded with the promise to supply "Costumes for All Occasions."
+
+In response to his summons a petite dark woman in a loose-flowing garnet
+robe opened the door and voiced the professional query, "You have an
+appointment?"
+
+When the visitor had admitted that his call was impromptu, she
+considered for a moment. "I have a client just now," she explained, "and
+you may not want to wait until his sitting is over."
+
+"I'll wait," Kenwick assured her. "How long does it take?" It was
+instantly apparent from Madame Rosalie's expression that this query was
+a violation of professional etiquette. As well inquire of a doctor how
+long it will take to perform a major operation.
+
+Ignoring his query the medium opened the door wider and ushered her
+caller into the front room. It was a dim commonplace apartment furnished
+with flowered cretonne-covered chairs, a defiant-looking piano, and
+gilt-framed pictures. "You will find some magazines here," she promised.
+"Just make yourself at home, please."
+
+It would be a difficult achievement, the reporter decided, as he settled
+himself in one of the rigid-looking chairs. And Madame Rosalie's tone,
+though courteous, had not been eager or placating. It was apparent that
+she had plenty of business. Her manner of greeting had been more like
+that of an experienced and self-possessed hostess taken unawares by a
+guest, than of an exponent of the supernatural. She was obviously an
+educated woman. Her voice alone betrayed that fact, and she moved with a
+grace that seemed somehow incongruous in those sordid surroundings. As
+he sat beside the bow-windows, gazing out into the fog, Kenwick smiled
+grimly. "I don't know Drew yet," he murmured, "but whoever he is, I'll
+bet she can give him a run for his money."
+
+Within twenty minutes he heard low voices at the far end of the hall,
+and then the sound of approaching footsteps. He rose and went to the
+door. Madame Rosalie and her client were emerging from a shadowy chamber
+whose door was draped with maroon-colored portières. The caller had
+reached the hat-rack and was jerking himself into his overcoat when all
+at once he stopped with words of astonished greeting. "Why, hello,
+Kenwick!" He strode forward with extended hand. And Kenwick gripped it
+with an equal astonishment. It was one of the men whom he had known well
+at college. "Going it strong now that you are back in civilization
+again?" On his face was genuine pleasure and the shamefaced expression
+that it would have worn if the newspaper reporter had suddenly
+encountered him tobogganing down one of San Francisco's hills on a
+child's coaster.
+
+When he was gone the reporter followed his hostess into the room with
+the maroon-colored curtains. It was as shabby as the waiting-room but
+more comfortable and somehow expressive of a strong personality. Over a
+felt-covered table, strewn with cards and stubs of pencils and other
+aids to occult communication, was an electric bulb held in place by a
+loop of white cotton string. Madame Rosalie motioned him to a seat
+beside this table and sank into a deep chair on the opposite side.
+
+For a moment neither of them spoke. Madame Rosalie's eyes rested upon
+her client with a scrutiny that was not inquisitive but almost
+uncomfortably searching. They were dark eyes and brilliant with the
+unnatural shining that is often caused by chronic insomnia. At first
+glance he had thought that her hair was confined under a net; now at
+close range he saw that it was cut short and waved alluringly over the
+lobes of her ears. She had been a beautiful woman once, he reflected,
+but life had given her brutal treatment.
+
+He picked up a crystal sphere that was lying upon the table. "Tell me
+what you see for me in that?" he commanded.
+
+She turned it slowly under the light. Kenwick watching her, felt a
+little cheated by the unspectacular quality of her technic. For all the
+thrill which she seemed likely to give him, he might as well be opening
+an interview with the census-taker.
+
+"You came," the medium said at last, still gazing into the depths of the
+crystal, "to consult me, not about the future but the past."
+
+He made no response.
+
+"You are in trouble," she went on in the same unhurried voice. "You are
+in great trouble--but you are not taking the right way out."
+
+"What is the right way out?"
+
+"You must have help."
+
+An expression of annoyance crossed his face. She would follow up that
+statement, of course, with the suggestion that he enlist for a prolonged
+course of "readings." He was preparing a curt dismissal of this plan
+when suddenly she set the crystal down upon the table and looked at him
+with compassionate eyes. "You must have help," she repeated. "But it
+must be the help of some one who is dear to you--or _was_ dear to you."
+
+"Can you evoke such a spirit?"
+
+"I don't know. I never can promise, but I'll try."
+
+She leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes. The man, looking at
+her from across the table, was startled at the change in her face. For
+hers was that type of face which is dominated by the eyes. Without their
+too brilliant light it suffered a complete loss of personality. Words
+came at last through her slightly parted lips. "There is some one who
+wishes to speak to you. I think it is a woman."
+
+"A woman!" Kenwick was not conscious that his tone held a note of
+disappointment. "Who is she?"
+
+"I can't quite get the name. It's a difficult control. But she wants
+very much to talk to you. She says----It will be hard to forgive at
+first, but you must come back."
+
+"Back where?"
+
+The voice went on, unheeding. "She says----that she was influenced by
+some one else--some one stronger. You must look for that man. You must
+never stop looking for him----in crowds and everywhere you go you must
+look. And when you see his face you will know at once that he is the
+one, the only one who can help you. He is your missing link."
+
+There was a long pause. "Anything else?" Kenwick inquired at last. His
+voice was guarded but he was strangely moved.
+
+"There is some one calling to you. He seems to be in a prison and he is
+looking out through iron bars. They might be the bars of a gate. I can't
+see the face, but some one is calling your name."
+
+"Shall I answer the call?"
+
+"No. There would be no use. It is too late now."
+
+Her eyes opened suddenly and met Kenwick's fixed upon them intent but
+inscrutable. He stretched his hand across the table.
+
+"Read my palm."
+
+She held it only a moment but her eyes seemed to take in its every line
+at a glance. "There is a perpetual conflict raging in your soul," she
+said.
+
+He smiled. "That's true of most people, isn't it?"
+
+Madame Rosalie had a superb disregard for irrelevancies. "Part of you is
+eager to plunge gallantly into the tasks of the present, but the other
+part is holding you back. You have the drooping head-line with the
+introspective fingers. It's a bad sign on the hand of the creative
+temperament. And you are some kind of a creative artist; painter,
+musician, or writer. But your head-line didn't always droop. It's a
+recent tendency, so you have a good chance to overcome it."
+
+"How can I overcome it?"
+
+"In the first place, give up all idea of trying to reconcile yourself
+with the past. You can't possibly do it and the effort may--wreck you."
+
+He got to his feet and stood looking down at her. "There doesn't seem to
+be much ahead for me, does there?" he said.
+
+"There is everything ahead; all the tragedy is behind you." She was
+still looking at him compassionately. "You are too young," she said at
+last.
+
+"Too young for what?"
+
+"To have lost so much out of your life." Her voice was like red coals
+leaping into sudden flame. It startled Kenwick. "And you are choosing
+just the wrong way to wrestle with such a loss. You had originally a
+splendid initiative, an impatient desire for action. But the artistic
+side of your nature has assumed control of you. And the artistic
+temperament is long on endurance and short on combativeness. If you
+spent one-third of the time fighting this specter in your past that you
+spend trying to reconcile yourself to it, you would win gloriously."
+
+For a few moments they stood beside the table talking of commonplaces.
+Once Kenwick mentioned Professor Drew, and Madame Rosalie smiled.
+
+"I'm not afraid of him," she said. "And neither do I care to enter into
+a public debate with him."
+
+She followed her client to the door. "I'm sorry I wasn't able to help
+you more. But you are not ready for my help yet."
+
+Kenwick walked back to the "Clarion" office with these words ringing in
+his ears. The messages from the other world may have been guess-work,
+but at least she was a shrewd reader of character. And contrary to all
+his expectations she had not made any effort to win him for a permanent
+client.
+
+His Sunday story, featuring her and Professor Drew, was all that Boyer
+had hoped for it. The astrologist was sketched with a few vivid strokes,
+the room with the maroon-colored curtains more in detail, and an
+interview reported which thrilled the souls of the credulous and held
+even the attention of the skeptical. There was neither ridicule nor
+championship in the story, and the caustic comments of Professor Drew
+were bare of journalistic comment. Altogether, the thing worked up well
+and made a hit. After reading it during his late breakfast at the St.
+Germaine, Kenwick suddenly decided to go around to the Hartshire
+Building and keep his promise to Jarvis. He found the photographer
+enveloped in a long black apron and rubber gloves. "Good boy!" he cried
+slapping his visitor on the back. "I've been thinking about you and that
+cursed story you told me: can't get the blame thing out of my head. That
+was good stuff about the clairvoyant in the 'Clarion' this morning.
+Where on earth do you dig up those oddities? I recognized your
+pen-name."
+
+He hung Kenwick's coat in a shallow closet as he talked. "You are in the
+nick of time to help me with an experiment if you will," he went on. "I
+want to do some research work on the human eye and I've got to have a
+subject. I've got a lot of cards here--featuring optical illusions and
+that sort of thing. Do you mind helping me for, say, half an hour? You
+see, the human eye and brain are the ideal apparatus for perfecting the
+camera and I'm working on an invention."
+
+Kenwick complied with alacrity, glad of the opportunity to get his mind
+off of himself. For almost an hour Jarvis worked under the black hood of
+the tripod while Kenwick reported on the images printed upon the cards.
+When the tests were finished and he rose to go, the photographer pushed
+aside his paraphernalia and wiped his forehead. "Hot as Hades under that
+thing!" he cried. "Say, I was wondering the other day if you play golf."
+
+"I used to go out and play with my brother at his club," Kenwick
+replied. "But it's been some time ago; I'd be a duffer at it now."
+
+"Well, I've got a card that will let us into the club over in
+Claremont," Jarvis explained. "If you haven't got anything better to do,
+what do you say that we meet at the ferry building about two o'clock
+this afternoon and play a few holes over on the course? It's a great day
+to be outside. Can you make it?"
+
+"Yes, I think so." For a moment Kenwick stood looking at his host with
+an expression that puzzled Jarvis. Then abruptly he turned and went
+away. Up the steep California street hills he strode, scarcely conscious
+of the effort it cost. For a horrible dread was tearing at his heart. It
+was not a new sensation to him, and its very familiarity made it the
+more hideous; that persistent dread known only to those who are
+struggling back over the hard road of mental prostration. The seed of it
+had sprouted on the morning when he had bought that fatal newspaper at
+the Third and Townsend Depot. And during the weeks that followed its
+tendrils had wrapped a strangle-hold about his life. Sometimes it almost
+stopped his breathing. And as yet he had never seen the thing that he
+dreaded. It was not yet upon any one's face. But he assured himself
+desperately that some day he would see it. Some day, when perhaps he
+wasn't thinking about it at all, it would suddenly leap out at him. In
+the eyes of some man or woman, or perhaps even some little child, he
+would see suspicion or fear or morbid curiosity. Without being told,
+they would know suddenly that here was a man who had once lost his
+mental grip. They would be afraid that he might suddenly lose it again,
+and that shuddering fear would send him reeling backward into the land
+of shadows and specters.
+
+He stumbled on blindly, and through the blackness of his anguish there
+came to him again the curious sensation that he had experienced on his
+second night at Mont-Mer; the sensation of having lost some material
+prop that could restore his courage.
+
+The genial suggestion of Jarvis that they play golf together over in
+Claremont was like a cool hand laid upon his forehead. To Jarvis he must
+seem sane and normal, capable at least of acquitting himself creditably
+in the sport of sane and normal men. He ate a hasty and solitary lunch
+and at two o'clock met the photographer in front of the flower-booth in
+the ferry building for an afternoon at the country club.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+It was Sunday afternoon, and Marcreta was expecting a caller. "How long
+do you think he'll stay?" Clinton demanded as they rose from their two
+o'clock dinner.
+
+"As long as I'll let him, I suppose."
+
+"Well, call a time-limit, Crete." And then recalled suddenly to the
+realization that he must begin making the best of a situation that gave
+every evidence of forcing itself upon him for life, he added hastily,
+"What's the use of trying that new cure if you're going to pull against
+it all the time?"
+
+"Do you call this 'pulling against it'?"
+
+"I do, decidedly. Every time that man comes here you're strung about an
+octave higher than normal."
+
+She looked at him, astonished. "Why, Clinton, I don't feel it myself.
+I'm not conscious that he affects me that way."
+
+"He does, though. We all know people who affect us that way. And it is
+not a question of attraction or aversion. Liking or disliking them
+doesn't alter the fact that they have the power to screw us up.
+Sometimes, of course, it's a beneficial stimulant, but you shouldn't be
+taking anything like that just now. Give Dr. Reynolds a chance."
+
+"I will give him a chance. But to-day----Well, I promised Mr. Glover
+that I'd listen to something that he has written."
+
+"Help! Then he'll probably be here to supper. I didn't know he'd broken
+into the writing game."
+
+"I didn't either until the other day. But I think it is some advertising
+for the new springs. He is very versatile. He does a number of things
+and does them well."
+
+Her brother glanced at her sharply without replying. That note of
+championship in her voice put an edge on his nerves.
+
+But she was mistaken in her guess concerning advertising matter for the
+American Carlsbad. For when she and Richard Glover were alone in the
+living-room he produced a copy of one of the popular magazines. "You
+remember you said I might read you something to-day?" he began, drawing
+his chair into a better light.
+
+"Yes. I have been looking forward to it with pleasure. But I thought it
+would be in manuscript. It is something you have had published?"
+
+"My first attempt at anything in this line. It's a serial story and this
+is the initial instalment. You see, I had a good deal of leisure time on
+my hands when I was down at Mont-Mer and I've always wanted to try my
+luck with a pen. I call this 'A Brother of Bluebeard.'"
+
+"That's a gruesome title, but excellently chosen if it's a
+mystery-story. I'm shivering already."
+
+He settled himself with his back to the light and his profile toward
+her. "I may as well tell you at first that I am not bringing this out
+under my own name."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Because I wouldn't have felt quite free about writing it if I were
+standing out in the open."
+
+"Oh, it's a true story?"
+
+"No, I can hardly claim that for it. It's rather a fantastic plot as you
+will see. But every writer knows this, that when you first break into
+print whatever you write is supposed to be transcribed almost verbatim
+from actual experience, preferably your own experience. No matter how at
+variance with your own life-plot the story may be, the people who know
+you will leap to the conclusion that it is rooted in autobiography.
+Imagination is the very last thing that our friends are willing to allow
+us."
+
+"What nom-de-plume do you use?"
+
+"Ralph Regan. It's short and snappy and sounds as if it might be
+genuine, don't you think?"
+
+He found the place and began to read in a resonant, well-modulated
+voice. The opening paragraph was a little stilted, a bit amateurish, but
+after that the story swung into bold and breathless action. It gripped
+its hearer with a compelling force that held her tense and motionless in
+her chair. Only the sound of the reader's voice and the crisp crackle of
+paper when he turned a page broke the quiet of the room. Outside, a gray
+January mist engulfed the city, and electric bulbs from the houses
+across the street cut bleary patches in the mantle of fog. For almost an
+hour Richard Glover read in his clear, unhurried voice, and Marcreta
+listened, her wide eyes fastened upon his face.
+
+When he had finished, with the irritating promise, "To Be Continued," he
+laid the periodical face-down upon the library-table and turned toward
+her. In his amber eyes was a new light. A railroad switchman who faces
+the company's president after saving a train from destruction might wear
+just that expression.
+
+Marcreta seemed bereft of speech. She was staring at one of the lights
+in the house across the street as though it had hypnotized her. One of
+the delicate white hands was clasped tight upon the arm of her chair.
+Richard Glover told himself that he had never seen her look so
+beautiful. And for the first time since he had known her, there was not
+a suggestion of invalidism in her tall, regal figure. She was wearing a
+filmy gray dress with a touch of pink that seemed to give a heightened
+flush to her cheeks. He allowed several seconds to pass. Was it
+possible, he was wondering, that this "first story" had won that tribute
+most coveted by all authors--the tribute of breathless silence?
+
+"Well?" he ventured at last. "What do you think of it?"
+
+She brought her eyes back to the room, to the magazine lying face-down
+upon the table, but not to him. "I think," she said with a long sigh,
+"that you are a wonderfully clever man."
+
+The light flickered out of his eyes. He leaned toward her with a
+pleading gesture. "Is that all you are going to say to me?"
+
+"Isn't that enough? Wouldn't you rather have me say that than anything
+else?"
+
+"You know I wouldn't. You know that there are many other things that I
+would far rather have you say." He came over and stood beside her chair.
+"Marcreta," he begged, "say just one of them. Say this--that you are
+glad to have me come here. I wrote that story for you; because I know
+that you value creative power more than anything else in the world. Are
+you glad that I did it? Are you glad that I brought it to you?"
+
+She was looking at him now, all her ardent soul in her eyes. "I _am_
+glad," she breathed. "I can't tell you how glad."
+
+"Then I think you ought to give me some reward. I ought to have at
+least----"
+
+She put out her hand with the imperious little gesture that he had come
+to know well. "Not just now. Please, not just now. You see, you have
+rather--swept me off my feet. Isn't that enough for one day?"
+
+"It is enough," he assured her exultantly. And when, a few moments
+later, he climbed into the roadster that was waiting at the curb, he was
+repeating the three words over and over to himself like a hilarious
+refrain.
+
+Just at dusk Clinton came home and found his sister still sitting in
+front of the gas logs where Richard Glover had left her. His step
+startled her out of a reverie. "Oh, it's you, Clint! I'm so glad you've
+come. The house has been full of ghosts."
+
+"I suppose so. Glover come?"
+
+"Yes. He has come and gone."
+
+He reached down swiftly and felt one of her hands. It was icy.
+"Something has happened, Crete." The words were not a question, but they
+demanded a reply. And she gave it without hesitation.
+
+"Yes, something has happened. I've got to take some action about it too,
+but I haven't decided yet what it shall be."
+
+He stood on the hearth-rug looking down at her with a curious mixture of
+annoyance and admiration in his eyes. It had always been so, he
+reflected. About the trivial things of life she was willing to abide by
+his judgment, but in every vital issue she took the initiative and
+pushed her own convictions through. In the moment of large emergency she
+had always stood superbly alone. As he looked at her a half-audible sigh
+escaped him. After all, this semblance of vitality was but the ephemeral
+stimulation of excitement. And he dreaded the bleak reaction from it;
+that sudden ebbing away of hope, known to all of those who have kept
+long vigils beside sick beds.
+
+"Let me manage it, whatever it is," he commanded. "I've told you before
+that you're not strong enough for these emotional scenes. It isn't as if
+you were a well woman."
+
+She lapsed into silence, and he felt a sharp twinge of self-reproach. It
+was that double-edged remorse that chivalrous strength always feels when
+it reminds frailty of its weakness.
+
+"Whatever it is, Crete," he hurried on, "can't you defer the action
+until a more propitious time? Can't it wait until you are stronger?"
+
+A little choking sound came from her. He stopped short in swift alarm.
+Never before in all the long years of her semi-invalidism had she let
+him see her give way to tears. He went to her, moving uncertainly as
+though through unfamiliar territory. She had covered her face with her
+hands as though she could shut out with them the sounds of passionate
+sobbing.
+
+"I'll never be any stronger, Clint. _You_ know it; _I_ know it. Why do
+we drag on with this miserable pretense? Oh, it is killing me, but it
+takes so long. Why can't I die?"
+
+He recoiled before that cry, before the havoc that it revealed to him.
+Inwardly he cursed himself and then he remembered Glover, as he might
+have remembered a gun which he had accidentally discharged, believing it
+to be unloaded. He couldn't endure the thought that _he_ had hurt her
+and, manlike, seized upon the first scapegoat that offered itself. But
+he carefully refrained from a mention of the late caller. And when he
+spoke his voice was harsh with feeling. "Crete, how selfish of you. If
+you should die, what would become of me?"
+
+The promptness of her reply struck him like a blow. "You'd marry. You're
+over thirty, Clint, and if it hadn't been for me you would have been
+married years ago and would be living a normal life in a home of your
+own. You think----" She was sitting upright now, facing him with a
+terrible courage. "You think I don't realize what you have sacrificed.
+Oh, if you only knew how I've lain awake at night, staring into the
+dark, praying to die so that I could set you free. You promised mother.
+I've always known that you did. But even if you hadn't, you would have
+promised yourself. And _that's_ what has 'keyed me up,' as you express
+it. That's what is making me live an octave higher than I can stand. It
+isn't--any other man who is doing it. It's you."
+
+He sat down on the broad arm of her chair as though overcome by sudden
+weakness. "Well, thank God you have told me this, Crete, before it eats
+any deeper into your soul. Sacrifice you call it. But sacrifice involves
+renunciation, and I have never renounced any woman for your sake. I have
+never been engaged--nor wanted to be."
+
+"But you ought to," she told him violently. "You ought to, and you would
+if you hadn't unconsciously put the idea away from you so many times.
+You ought to have a home and wife and children. Oh, I know that you
+should, and the knowledge has made me desperate."
+
+A dawning suspicion showed in his eyes and then they grew hard. "It must
+have," he said coldly. "It must have made you very desperate indeed--if
+you have been considering Glover as a way out."
+
+She met the charge without resentment. "What other way is there for me?
+You see, there wouldn't be any danger of my--caring more for somebody
+else afterward. That is quite beyond the range of possibility now, so it
+would be safer for me than for some women. And physical disability, the
+thing that made me--that would have made me refuse a man of a different
+type, wouldn't count at all with him. His ambitions are purely material,
+and I could capitalize them. That's all he wants. It would really be
+quite a fair bargain."
+
+Clinton Morgan rose slowly and stood looking down at his sister as
+though she were a stranger to whom he had just been introduced. "Well,
+by Gad!" he breathed, and for a moment was bereft of further speech. And
+then his words came slowly, and more as the detached fragments of a
+soliloquy than a response to her own.
+
+"Crete, of all women in the world! You, with your temperament! With an
+idealism that I and most other men couldn't touch with a ten-foot
+pole--and yet you'd work out a proposition like that! I didn't know that
+you saw through Glover. I made that excuse for you, that you were too
+unsophisticated to see through him. But sizing him up for an adventurer,
+you frame up a contract that----Why, I'll be hanged if I can believe
+it, Crete. I simply can't believe it."
+
+She made no defense, and he went on in the same dazed tone.
+
+"Go out on the street and pick up the first girl you meet and bring her
+in here. If I should make love to her and try to get her to marry me,
+and succeed, I'd have a much better chance of happiness than this
+adventure would ever give you. For, at least, I'd be swimming with both
+hands free. Now listen." He seemed to become suddenly aware of her
+presence again. "When I fall in love, I'll begin to think about getting
+married. But I'm not going to be hurried into it by you or anybody else.
+And when I decide to marry, not you nor anybody else shall stand in my
+way."
+
+She reached for him with a convulsive gesture. "Clinton, do you mean
+that? Do you mean that nobody should?"
+
+"I pledge you my word. But this has got to be a bargain. You have
+demonstrated that you know how to make one. Now don't you ever let that
+man cross this threshold again."
+
+"I've got to, Clint. After what happened this afternoon, I've got to let
+him come--for a while."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Sit down and let me tell you about it. I'll have to tell you, or it
+will eat up my heart. But the thing will seem incredible."
+
+"Not to me. I think after what I've just heard that I can believe
+anything."
+
+"Well, you remember that I told you he had promised to read me
+something that he had written?"
+
+"Yes, advertising matter for the new Carlsbad."
+
+"I thought it was going to be that but I was mistaken. It _was_
+advertising matter, but not for Carlsbad."
+
+"For what, then?"
+
+"For Richard Glover."
+
+Clinton grunted. "I see. He is trying to win you by doing the _Othello_
+stunt on paper."
+
+Marcreta appeared to weigh the suggestion. "I don't think it is entirely
+that. He wants money very badly. He has to have money, a lot of it, for
+this hotel venture, and he is trying every means of getting it."
+
+"I've always been led to believe," Clinton interposed, "my friends who
+write have always led me to believe that story-writing (and I assume
+that this was some sort of story) is rather an uncertain means of
+capitalization for a novice."
+
+"But this story was not written by a novice, Clint." Marcreta's voice
+had sunk suddenly almost to a whisper. "It was written by----"
+
+"By whom?"
+
+"Roger Kenwick."
+
+Clinton Morgan stiffened in his chair. "_What?_" he cried. "You mean to
+say that he had the nerve to steal the thing and bring it out under his
+own name?"
+
+"He is too clever to bring it out under his own name. He chose a
+fictitious name, and he changed the opening paragraph. But except for
+that and the alteration of the title, I pledge you my word, Clint, that
+that story is exactly as Roger Kenwick read it to me, before he went
+into the service."
+
+There was a moment of silence. Clinton was recalling what she had said
+when he came in about ghosts. He scanned her face uneasily. And he saw
+in it the new expression which had startled Richard Glover. For the
+first time in his life he began to think of her as she might be if she
+were unhampered by physical infirmity. And then he fell to wondering
+what had passed between her and Kenwick; just how far the tragedy of his
+life had affected her. The Morgan reserve had kept her completely silent
+upon this subject and he had never had any wish to intrude himself into
+her confidence. He picked up the thread of the story where she had
+dropped it. "How could it have happened? And how did he dare?"
+
+"I can't even make a guess at how it happened, but so far as daring
+goes----Well, as I said, he is desperate for money. And the thing, as
+looked at from his point of view, was not so very risky. Why should it
+be? He must have discovered in some way that the--the author was not a
+possible source of trouble. And who else could care about it? Never in
+his wildest dreams would any one conjure up the possibility that I might
+know. He doesn't have the least idea, of course, that I ever knew the
+real author. What a nemesis! That he should have chosen me, of all the
+people in the world, for his audience! It's so impossible that he will
+never suspect it."
+
+"But what happened after he had finished? What did you do?"
+
+"Nothing, except to compliment him on his cleverness and try to hide
+every emotion that I've ever had. It was hard; I think it's the hardest
+test I've ever had to meet. But it has given me something that I never
+have had before." Her voice grew husky with sudden embarrassment. "O
+Clint, you were right about him. I've known for quite a long time that
+you were right about him, but I couldn't admit it to myself; not with
+the course that I had decided to take. But, Clint, although I knew he
+was calculating and sordid and insincere, I didn't know this about him.
+I didn't think he hadn't a sense of honor. If I had suspected that, it
+would have made everything different. But you can see," she went on
+eagerly, "you can see now why I must let him go on coming here for a
+while? Why I can't let him get beyond my sight?"
+
+Her brother nodded. "Give him enough rope and he'll hang himself, that's
+the idea, isn't it?"
+
+"I've got to be very careful, you see. He has told me a good many things
+about himself of late, and I'm trying to fit them all together. Some of
+them don't match at all. And now that he has revealed himself, I'm
+beginning to doubt everything. That Mont-Mer secretaryship, for
+instance, looks very improbable to me now. I've questioned him about
+several prominent people down there, and he doesn't seem to have heard
+of any of them."
+
+"Well, don't worry any more about it just now, Crete. Let's hustle
+something to eat and call it a day."
+
+When his sister had gone to bed that night Clinton sat for a long time
+in the library, staring into the fireplace. The little scene which had
+been enacted there a few hours earlier had stirred him to the depths of
+his being. It brought him perplexity and a poignant self-reproach. The
+fact that she was not the crying type of woman made her emotional
+abandon a particularly haunting thing.
+
+"I've been an awful ass," he muttered. "I can't see just now where it is
+exactly that I failed. But it's evident that somewhere along the line
+I've acted like one of the early Christian martyrs."
+
+He picked up a little volume that was lying at his elbow. It was a
+dainty thing bound in gold and ivory. He remembered that Roger Kenwick
+had given it to his sister on that last night when he had come to bid
+her good-by. He had never looked into it before. Now he turned the pages
+idly. It was modern verse, and he read intermittently here and there.
+Among the leaves he came at last upon a folded bit of paper. It was in
+Marcreta's handwriting; evidently something that she had copied. He
+tilted it under the light and read the trio of stanzas.
+
+    I cannot drive thee from my memory;
+      I cannot live and tear thee from my heart.
+    Is there no corner of oblivion's realm
+      Whence thy uneasy spirit may depart?
+
+    If love were dead, if love could only die,
+      And leave me desolation and despair;
+    The emptiness of day, the aching night,
+      All these at last my soul could learn to bear.
+
+    But ever when I think thy fire is spent
+      And seek the peace of death's all-sacred pain,
+    Behold, comes Memory with her torch a-light--
+      And all my altar flames to life again.
+
+Clinton Morgan folded the bit of paper with reverent fingers. For he
+knew, all at once, that this was not a copy of anything, but that he had
+unwittingly torn aside the veil of his sister's secret soul. He felt all
+of the honorable man's repugnance against outraged decency. The scrap of
+paper seemed to scorch his fingers. With a punctilious regard for
+detail, which he knew to be absurd, he tried to find the exact page
+where it had been concealed. Then he put the volume back upon the table
+and went over to the window. His conjectures concerning this romance had
+come to an end. Now he knew, and knowing felt suddenly weighted with
+guilt.
+
+He could imagine now how she must have felt as she had sat, a few hours
+before, listening to the paragraphs of Kenwick's masterpiece as they
+fell from the glib tongue of Richard Glover. There was an expression
+almost of awe upon his face. She could write all that, feel all that
+for one man, and then deliberately plan to marry another, to set _him_
+free! The thing seemed preposterous, and yet he knew it to be true.
+
+And then his thoughts reverted to Kenwick, and the days that now seemed
+almost like the unreal days of a dream, when he had first known him over
+at the fraternity-house in Berkeley. He recalled the night when he had
+brought him home to dinner and introduced him to Marcreta and tried to
+make him show off for her like a trained puppy. Perhaps it would have
+been better if he had never brought him. But these things were in the
+hands of fate and fate has an infinite number of tools. Standing there
+at the window, gazing at the reflection of the gas logs mirrored against
+the black pane, he found himself growing suddenly resentful of the
+casual emergencies of life. Mere cobweb threads they were but upon them
+hung the destinies of human souls. You turned the first corner instead
+of the second in an hour of aimless wandering, and the circulation of
+your life current was completely changed. It was folly to believe that
+all the corners were posted with signs to be read and heeded by that
+secret autocrat, the subconscious mind. The intricacies of such a
+universe made the brain reel. It was better to believe that we played
+the game blind, and that the stakes were to the courageous.
+
+He went back to the table and turned out the reading-lamp, blotting out
+the sight of the white and gold book.
+
+"Lord! What a pity!" he murmured. "She would have been such an
+inspiration to him. It was the devil's own luck. Poor Kenwick! Poor
+little Crete!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+Madame Rosalie was setting her stage for a caller. It was evidently to
+be an important client, for cards, crystal, horoscope, ouija-board, and
+other handmaidens to divination were set forth upon the table in the dim
+back parlor. The priestess herself, in her garnet-colored robe, moved
+about the room with the noiselessness of a shadow. Although it was
+barely dusk she drew the shades and swung the electric bulb over the end
+of the table. Then she stood surveying her work with the critical
+scrutiny of an artist experimenting for the best light upon his picture.
+Her too-brilliant eyes roved restlessly from one carefully arranged
+detail to another.
+
+Suddenly a footstep sounded outside, and there was a buzz of the
+electric bell. Madame Rosalie waited exactly the correct length of time
+before responding to its summons. The interval was expressive neither of
+eagerness nor indifference. When she returned to her sanctum it was to
+usher into it a man who moved hurriedly, drew off a pair of heavy
+driving-gloves, and tossed them into the Morris-chair. The astrologist
+removed them quietly to a settee in a far corner of the apartment and
+seated herself in the chair.
+
+"They say you're the eighth wonder of the world." Her visitor spoke with
+a thinly veiled sarcasm as he took his place under the light. "I might
+as well tell you at the outset that I don't go in much for this sort of
+thing. I'm here upon the suggestion of somebody else. I've known a good
+many of you trance mediums and my experience has been that you're strong
+on the future and weak on the past. You play safer that way. But it
+happens that I want help with the past more than with the future. What's
+the idea now? Are you going to hypnotize me?"
+
+His voice was not antagonistic, only briskly businesslike. He might have
+been suggesting that he try on the suit of clothes which a salesman was
+proffering for his favor.
+
+Madame Rosalie answered in the low, slightly indifferent voice that had
+surprised Roger Kenwick. "Hypnotism is a coöperative measure. I couldn't
+hypnotize you unless you were willing and would help me."
+
+He laughed. "That's a good deal for you to admit. Most of you people
+claim to be able to do anything."
+
+"Do you wish me to try to hypnotize you?"
+
+"No, I don't care about it especially. It takes a lot of time, doesn't
+it? Get busy on something that comes right down to brass tacks."
+
+She turned the crystal sphere slowly in her hand. "You are obsessed by a
+fear, and you have reason to be. There is a very serious problem
+confronting you, and you need help in solving it. I can't help you, but
+perhaps I can find some one else who can."
+
+She gathered up a bundle of cards. At first glance he had thought they
+were playing-cards, but he saw now that the reverse sides were all
+blanks. "On each of these I am going to write a word," she explained.
+"I'll hold it for an instant before your eyes. Read it, close your eyes,
+and then look at those maroon-colored curtains over there."
+
+Without comment he followed these instructions. Ten minutes passed while
+the client glanced at the cards and then at the curtains. Sometimes his
+gaze strayed back to the bit of pasteboard before the medium had another
+one ready. By the end of the hour she had cast his horoscope, read his
+palm, and performed other mystic rites. Then she settled back in the
+deep chair and announced herself ready to "project the astral body." A
+few moments passed in absolute silence. The medium appeared to fall into
+a light slumber, and the man on the other side of the table was prepared
+to see her face contorted by the writhing pains of the trance victim.
+But it remained calm, almost deathlike. His shrewd eyes were sizing her
+up as she slept. He seemed almost to forget that he had come for
+spiritual counsel, and his gaze was calculating, speculative, as though
+he were considering her possibilities as an ally. Suddenly a voice came
+from the depths of the chair. It made him jump. It was not the voice of
+Madame Rosalie, but one that seemed vaguely familiar.
+
+"Marstan is dead." The words died away in a kind of moan. After an
+interval of silence came the message, "He says to tell you that you have
+found the criminal, and now is the time to act." She seemed to sink
+deeper into oblivion. The client waited a full minute. Then he leaned
+over and whispered through the stillness two words--"Rest Hollow."
+
+The medium's head rolled from side to side on the cushions of the
+chair, like that of a surgical patient who is trying to escape the ether
+sponge. "Gone!" she muttered. "All gone!"
+
+He swept aside the cards and ouija-board and leaned closer, his hands
+almost touching hers. The amused skepticism had died out of his amber
+eyes, and the question that he asked came in a tense whisper. "Where is
+Ralph Regan?"
+
+A frown drew the woman's heavy black brows together. "Gone!" she
+murmured again. "Gone!"
+
+It was not possible for him to determine from her tone whether she was
+answering his last question or merely repeating her response to "Rest
+Hollow." He tried again.
+
+And after a moment the reply came slowly through stiff lips. "The way
+leads over a curving road. Follow that road to a place with a high stone
+fence where the gates stand always open. There you will find him."
+
+He settled back in his chair, his eyes resting, fascinated, upon the
+graven face.
+
+"Marstan is here." She spoke in her own voice now and there was in it a
+note of infinite weariness. "He has something to say to you."
+
+The man smiled grimly. "I should think he would. Tell him to go ahead;
+I'm listening."
+
+"He says you must give up the first plan----" She frowned in the effort
+of transmission. "And the second plan--and try the third. He says there
+is a woman working in the plan too: she has just begun to work in it.
+You must get her aid or she might----"
+
+He leaned forward eagerly. "Yes? She might what?"
+
+"I don't quite get it. It's a difficult control. But he seems to be
+afraid of that woman. He wants very much to warn you against----"
+
+She shivered slightly and opened her eyes. The man had left his seat and
+was standing close to her side. "I hope you got what you want," she said
+wearily. "I don't know when I've had a sitting that has cost so much."
+
+He crossed to the settee and picked up his gloves. "It must get on your
+nerves. Suppose we go out somewhere and have a little bite of supper. I
+know a place down on Dupont; no style about it, but they give you a
+great little meal. What do you say?"
+
+She glanced at the nickel clock upon the mantel. "It's almost seven,"
+she demurred, "and I expect another client at seven-thirty."
+
+"No more sittings to-night," he decreed. There was an almost insolent
+authority in his tone. "Time to call a halt. It's dinner-time in
+heaven, and spirits must live. You're coming out with me. Get on your
+street togs, little witch."
+
+Without further protest she obeyed while her escort waited in the shabby
+entrance-hall. At the curb he helped her into the roadster, and five
+minutes later they were seated at a small bare table in one of the
+popular bohemian restaurants of the downtown district.
+
+"No Martinis any more," he sighed, as he helped her out of her cheap
+coat with its imitation-fur collar. "Life isn't what it used to be, is
+it?" His own hat and expensive-looking overcoat he hung upon the peg in
+a diamond-shaped mirror bearing the soap-written injunction, "Try Our
+Tamales." "But they serve a placid little near-beer in this place that
+helps some. Bring two, waiter."
+
+When the attendant returned with the glasses, he tossed off the contents
+of his at a gulp, but the woman sipped hers with the leisurely enjoyment
+of the epicure. Then she set it down and stabbed with her fork at the
+dish of green olives in the center of the table.
+
+The soup came, a rich bean chowder, which she ate almost in silence,
+while her companion commented casually upon the service and furnishings
+of the café. They had a rear table near the swinging doors that led into
+the kitchen. It was not more or less conspicuous than any of the others.
+The atmosphere of unconventionality which pervaded the place seemed to
+envelop all its habitués in a sort of mystic veil that was in itself a
+guarantee of privacy. At the table nearest them a girl was talking
+earnestly to a man who sat with his arm about her. Madame Rosalie,
+raising her eyes from her soup-plate, encountered the bold, appraising
+stare of her escort. She returned it impersonally and with the flicker
+of a smile, taking in the "freckled" eyes and the large thin hands. And
+when she smiled her face re-gained something of a former beauty. The man
+leaned toward her with a consciously confiding manner. "You call
+yourself Madame Rosalie," he said. "But isn't it really Mademoiselle?"
+
+Her smile deepened but she gave him no answer. In the delicate, lacy
+waist and white skirt which she had donned, she looked years younger.
+There was a ruby pendant at her throat but she wore no other jewel. The
+garish light of the café, shining upon her straight black hair, gave it
+a luster that was like the dull gleam of jet.
+
+"Not Mademoiselle?" he queried again, and his smile was like the
+password between two brother lodge-members.
+
+And then Madame Rosalie lost some of her inscrutable reserve. "Not
+_Rosalie_," she corrected. "But it's a good name; as good as any other
+for my trade, don't you think?"
+
+He turned one of the clumsy glass salt-shakers between his fingers. "The
+name is all right," he admitted. "But--why do you do--that sort of
+thing? You admit yourself that it's hard on your nerves. Why do you do
+it--when you could do other things?"
+
+The waiter reappeared and littered the table with an army of small oval
+platters. Odors of highly seasoned macaroni and ragout steamed from
+them. Madame Rosalie dipped daintily into the nearest dish. But in spite
+of her restraint, it would have been apparent to a close observer that
+her enjoyment of the meal was the keen avidity of one who has been long
+denied. When the waiter was out of hearing, she caught up the last words
+sharply.
+
+"What do you mean by 'other things'?" For the first time her voice was
+eager, as though seeking counsel.
+
+He shrugged. "_I_ don't pretend to be a clairvoyant. Yet I know that
+there are other things that you could do--have done."
+
+"How do you know it?"
+
+"Well, in the first place, if you had been a medium for very long, the
+clever medium that you undoubtedly are, you would have made more money
+at it."
+
+"I have made money at it."
+
+"Not as much as you should have made. You wouldn't live as you do if you
+had money."
+
+If she resented this assertion, she gave no sign of it, and he went on
+with the cool assurance of a physician who is certain of his diagnosis.
+"You may persuade yourself that you are in that business because you are
+interested in it or because you know that you have an unaccountable
+power. But you are doing it chiefly for the same reason that most of us
+ply our trades; because you want to make money."
+
+"Well?" She commented, "It does supply me with a living, and you know
+there's a theory that we must live."
+
+He laughed. "You don't have to live the way you do. There are much
+easier ways for you to accomplish that end. Have you got anybody
+dependent on you?"
+
+"No, but I am horribly in debt." The admission seemed to slip from her
+without her permission, and when the words were out a little frown
+puckered her forehead. The eyes of her escort were fixed upon the ruby
+pendant, so obviously a genuine and costly stone. She toyed absently
+with it, putting a cruel strain upon its slender thread-like chain of
+gold. "Do you know," she said slowly, "I believe you would make a
+wonderful hypnotist. I believe that you could even hypnotize me."
+
+The bold amber eyes gazed straight into hers. "But you told me, didn't
+you, that hypnotism had to be a coöperative measure? You said, I
+remember, that nobody could hypnotize anybody else unless--unless the
+victim were willing."
+
+One of his hands closed over hers as it reached for the sugar-bowl. She
+made no effort to draw it away.
+
+"Perhaps," she answered softly, "perhaps the victim _is_ willing."
+
+He stacked up a little pile of the oval platters and pushed them
+impatiently to one side. "I guess we understand each other all right,"
+he said. "You need me and I need you. We've each come to the place where
+we need help. Now let's not waste any more time about it. Let's get down
+to brass tacks."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+It was seven o'clock on a rainy evening, and Kenwick turned up the
+collar of his coat as he left the St. Germaine. Inside the Hartshire
+Building there was a cheerful warmth that promised well for the evening.
+He ignored the elevator and walked up the three flights of stairs to the
+floor where the photographer had his rooms. On the way, he tried to
+persuade himself that he was not doing this in order to gain time. But
+there was a good hour intervening between now and time to start for the
+theater, and at the end of that hour, he reflected Jarvis might not care
+to keep the engagement.
+
+As he toiled upward Kenwick considered every possible detail of the
+scene that was before him, and then wearily discarded them all. "Why do
+I do it?" he challenged himself, as he reached the last landing. "How do
+I dare to do it? My God! I can't afford to do it; I've got to have one
+friend left!"
+
+But as he had once told Jarvis, those scenes of life whose settings are
+scrupulously ordered usually lack dramatic climax. At the end of what he
+was pleased to characterize as his "confession," the photographer
+surveyed him with sympathetic but unastonished eyes.
+
+"I'd begun to think that there might be something personal in it," he
+commented. "I could see that there was something lying heavy on your
+chest. It's a devilish mess, isn't it?"
+
+The other man was looking at him with a disconcerting sharpness. But the
+thing for which he probed was not in Granville Jarvis's eyes.
+
+"I seem to be such a helpless sort of brute," his host went on, and
+pushed a box of cigars across the table as though in an unconscious
+effort to make up with tobacco what he lacked in counsel. "I never can
+think of the right thing to do just on the spur of the minute.
+Inspiration has an uncomfortable habit of failing to keep her
+engagements with me."
+
+"I didn't expect any advice," Kenwick told him. "But it's a relief to
+tell you and get it off my mind; to tell you and yet not have you think
+that I ought to be locked up."
+
+"Somebody ought to be locked up," Jarvis remarked grimly. "And it's your
+job to find that person. Why don't you go East?"
+
+"I am going East. I've decided to go next week. It would be hard to make
+you understand why I haven't done it before, but----Well, this sort of
+an--illness does a terrible thing to a man's soul, Jarvis. It paralyzes
+his initiative. It gives him the most deadly thing in this world; the
+patience of despair. I'm constantly _waiting_ for things to clear up
+instead of going at them hammer and tongs."
+
+His companion nodded. "I think I understand. It would be the hell of a
+situation for you back there among people you've always known, and who
+presumably know all about you, and not being able to bridge the gap. I
+can see why you wanted to get a line on yourself first, and you're
+right, too. After all, a man owes something to his nervous system. But
+since you've decided to go and brave it out back there I think I'd let
+things rest the way they are till you go. Sometimes life works itself
+out better if we don't interfere too much. Somebody is bound to make a
+foolish play if you let them all manage their own hands."
+
+"And yet somebody told me the other day, Jarvis, that I was too passive
+in the crutches of fate; that I ought to be more combative, more
+aggressive."
+
+Jarvis laughed. "I'd be willing to bet that it was a woman who told you
+that."
+
+"Yes, a woman did tell me. It was that trance medium."
+
+"I might have guessed it. By the way, I went to see her myself the other
+day. Your story got me interested. She ought to have paid you a liberal
+commission for that yarn. But I suppose she doesn't even know you wrote
+it. She struck me as being a mighty clever little woman. Well, it's
+after eight o'clock. Let's go."
+
+They found their seats in the first row of the balcony. The house was
+brilliantly lighted and filling up rapidly. But although Jarvis had
+urged his companion to forget for a time the tangle in which he was
+enmeshed, it was he who returned to the theme while they sat waiting for
+the curtain to rise.
+
+"The trouble is, there's a missing link in the chain somewhere. I don't
+mean an event, but a person. Somebody dealt those cards, of course, and
+whoever did it knows where the marked one is. The New York trip may be a
+wild goose chase after all. Did you ever think of hiring a detective to
+help you out?"
+
+"Yes, I've thought of it a lot. But somehow I don't want to do it. I
+don't want to have anybody mixed up in my affairs as intimately as
+that. I can't explain my feeling about it. But there is so much noise
+about this sort of thing if it once rises to the surface, and if there's
+any graft connected with my name, I'd like to keep the scandal private.
+Besides," he laughed with a tolerant self-indulgence, "I don't suppose
+the person lives, Jarvis, who doesn't believe that way down inside of
+him somewhere, sleeping but never dead, is the genius of the detective.
+I've made a sort of a covenant with myself that I and no other shall run
+this thing to cover, and do it without kicking up a noise."
+
+Jarvis was staring speculatively at the foot-lights. "It's one of the
+most curious cases I ever knew. I'll tell you what, Kenwick. You're the
+original 'Wise Man from Our Town.' Remember him?
+
+    "And when he found his eyes were out,
+      With all his might and main,
+    He jumped into the bramble-bush
+      And scratched them back again."
+
+"A dangerous experiment, I always thought," Kenwick remarked.
+
+"So is dynamite, but sometimes we have to use it, and nothing else will
+take its place."
+
+"Are you advising me to put a bomb under somebody on the chance that it
+might be the man who shuffled the deck?"
+
+"No. I'm advising you to do the bramble-bush stunt. Don't jump forward;
+jump back."
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"Why, the more I think of it the more I believe that the solution of
+this mystery is to be found in the place where it began."
+
+"But where did it begin?"
+
+"So far as your knowledge of it extends, it began in the cañon or ravine
+or whatever place it was that you had the accident. If I'm not mistaken,
+Kenwick, that place is your bramble-bush."
+
+The curtain rose upon the first act and there was no opportunity for
+further conversation. It was during the intermission between the second
+and third acts that Jarvis, leaning over the balcony, said suddenly,
+"There's a friend of yours; fourth row on the right."
+
+Kenwick made a cursory examination of the seats and shook his head.
+"Don't see him. Don't see anybody I know here to-night except Aiken, our
+dramatic critic."
+
+"This is a woman. Count seven seats over in the fourth row. Isn't that
+lady in the garnet-colored coat your Madame Rosalie?"
+
+"You're right; it is."
+
+"I thought I couldn't be mistaken. There's a certain air of distinction
+about that woman in spite of----" Jarvis stopped, for he saw that his
+companion was not listening. For a moment Kenwick sat there staring down
+at the fourth row like a man in a dream. Then he gripped Jarvis's arm.
+"Look!" he cried. "Down there with Madame Rosalie."
+
+"What's the matter? You're such an excitable cuss, Kenwick."
+
+"That fellow who's with her. Look! Jarvis, _that's_ the man!"
+
+"What man?"
+
+"The man we've been talking about--my Missing Link."
+
+Together they leaned over the balcony and scrutinized, with the intent
+gaze of a pair of detectives, the couple in the fourth row right. It may
+have been coincidence, or it may have been that species of visual
+hypnotism known to us all, which suddenly impelled Madame Rosalie's
+escort to turn in his seat. His eyes swept the house with a casual
+glance, then lifted to the balcony. Slowly they surveyed the arc of
+faces above the lights. The two men leaning toward him did not move. In
+another instant he had found them, and for a full minute he and Roger
+Kenwick held each other. And then the theater went black as the curtain
+rose on the last act.
+
+Just before it was over Kenwick bade his companion a hurried farewell.
+"I'm going down and introduce myself to that fellow. I know I've seen
+him before somewhere, and he may be able to give me my clue. You don't
+mind if I break away? I want to catch him before he is lost in the
+crowd."
+
+But this hope was thwarted. For hurrying down the aisle in that moment
+before the rush of exit, while the audience was finding its wraps, he
+found two seats in the fourth row empty. Slowly he walked back to the
+St. Germaine, his thoughts in a tumult. Why should they have wanted to
+leave before the end of as good a performance as that? Something must
+have happened. Could it be that they had wanted to escape him? At such
+long range it hadn't been possible for him to determine whether or not
+there was a flash of recognition in the other man's eyes, but his
+mysterious disappearance was haunting. On the following morning, before
+going to the "Clarion" office he took a car out to Fillmore Street.
+
+At Madame Rosalie's shabby home a man in shirt sleeves opened the door.
+"Oh, she don't live here any more," he explained to the caller. "She
+moved a week ago. I'm gettin' the place ready for a new tenant."
+
+"Do you know where she went?"
+
+The man grinned. "Them mediums don't generally leave no forwardin'
+address. Their motto is 'Keep Movin'.' I will say, though, that the
+Rosalie woman was a perfect lady and paid her rent regular in advance."
+
+Kenwick walked away, turning this latest development slowly in his mind,
+looking at it from every angle. At his office he worked mechanically,
+scarcely conscious of what he wrote. He was in two minds now about the
+Eastern trip. Perhaps it would be better to take Jarvis's advice and let
+things have their head a bit longer. And he was certain of some of his
+facts now. The face of the man in the fourth row had been like the flash
+of a torch at midnight. For most of the night he had been awake, going
+back over the painful trail of the past, fitting some of its previously
+incomprehensible details into their places. What a curious mosaic his
+life had been! What contrasts of light and shade! But as for going back
+to Mont-Mer----The idea made him shudder. No, that was one thing he
+would not do. It would be like courting the return of a nightmare.
+
+At four o'clock he left the office and went to keep an appointment with
+Dr. Gregson Bennet in the Physicians' Building. Dr. Bennet belonged to
+that class of specialists who designate their business quarters in
+plural terms. His offices comprised a suite of four rooms. The sign on
+the door of the first one invited the caller to enter, unheralded.
+Complying with this injunction, Kenwick found himself in a well-lighted
+chamber containing a massive collection of light-green upholstery and an
+assortment of foreign-looking pictures artfully selected to convey the
+impression that their owner was on chummy terms with the capitals of
+Europe.
+
+As the door closed automatically behind him, a white-uniformed figure
+appeared, like a perfectly trained cuckoo, from the adjoining room and
+announced in level tones, "The-doctor-will-see-you-in-just-a-minute."
+Kenwick accepted this assurance with the grave credulity that one
+fiction-maker accords another. He glanced at the five other patients
+already awaiting their turns and picked up a magazine.
+
+By four-thirty he had read the jokes in the back of "Anybody's Magazine"
+for the preceding six months. No physician in reputable standing ever
+removes old numbers of periodicals from his files. For what better
+testimony can he offer in support of his claim upon a long-established
+practice? As Kenwick read, he was aware that his companions were being
+summoned one by one to embark upon that mysterious journey from whose
+bourne no traveler returns, departure having been arranged for around
+some obscure corner, to prevent exchange between arriving and retreating
+patient of a "Look! Stop! Listen!" signal.
+
+By five o'clock only one other patient besides himself remained; a
+little woman in shiny serge suit and passée summer hat. Kenwick put down
+his magazine with a long-drawn sigh, and she smiled in patient sympathy.
+"Gets pretty tiresome waitin', doesn't it?" she ventured.
+
+His quick eyes took in her shabby suit and the knotted ungloved hands.
+She was probably the mother of a growing family, he reflected, and would
+not get home in time now to prepare dinner. His easy sympathy flared
+into words.
+
+"It's an outrage to keep people waiting like this when they have an
+appointment for a definite hour. They tell me Bennet's a nerve
+specialist, and I believe it."
+
+She smiled wanly, but there was an eager championship in her response.
+"Oh, but he's wonderful! When he once begins to talk to you, you forget
+all about bein' mad at him. Seems like he sees right through your head
+to tell what's the matter with you."
+
+The white uniform appeared and pronounced a name: "Mr. Kenwick." He rose
+and followed her through the door. The second room was like the first,
+minus reading-matter and plus wall-charts. Here he sat, gazing at the
+fire-escapes on the opposite building, while the white uniform made a
+not completely satisfying attempt to collect family statistics. And
+then, at last, the door of the third room opened and Dr. Bennet himself
+emerged. He was enveloped in a heavy white apron that recalled to
+Kenwick's mind the pictures he had seen in the agricultural magazines
+featuring model dairying.
+
+But if the specialist had been slow to admit him, he was equally
+reluctant to let him go. When he had finished his examination, Kenwick
+stood beside the couch in the fourth and last room pulling on his coat.
+"Then you think I'm in pretty good condition, doctor?" Through the
+half-open door he could see the white uniform hovering, like an emblem
+of peace, above a steaming basin of warlike instruments.
+
+"I should say," the physician told him slowly, "that you are absolutely
+sound. Your nerves are a bit too highly charged, but I imagine that is
+more a matter of temperament than overstrain."
+
+"Is that all?"
+
+"No, that isn't all. The history of your case, as you have given it to
+me, is a most interesting one. And you were right to let me make the
+examination and form my own conclusions before telling me anything about
+your history. I wish it were possible for you to recall the name of the
+physician who handled your case in France. I'd like to get the
+scientific beginning of the story. Without it I can only make a guess,
+and guessing is not satisfactory. But I think that in his place I should
+have taken the chance and operated. However, you can't judge; he may not
+have had the proper equipment. I wish you would come around next
+Saturday when the office is closed, and let me make some X-ray plates.
+I'd like to display them at the medical convention in April."
+
+"And what do you advise me to do for my--my mental health?"
+
+"Forget your mental health. Take some regular out-of-door exercise and
+mix with your friends. I can't give you any better prescription than
+that. If it were something done up in pink paper you'd be more apt to
+take it, I know."
+
+Kenwick walked back through the darkening streets with a feeling of
+exultation. The pendulum of his despair was swinging backward to a
+height only attained by those who can plumb the depths of wretchedness.
+For the first time in six weeks he felt his old defiance of life. And
+recalling the pale ghost of a former prayer, he was ashamed of its
+cowardice. "_That_ never happens to the desperate and the lonely," he
+reminded himself grimly. "The best security on earth for a prolonged
+life is to express a sincere desire to die. After that, you lead a
+charmed existence. Houses burn to the ground and not one inmate escapes;
+ships go down with everybody aboard; pedestrians are run over by cars
+and shot by thugs, but none of these things come near the man who courts
+them. They overtake those whom others find it hard to spare, those whose
+lives are vivid with purpose."
+
+As he walked back to the hotel he found himself thinking of Marcreta
+again. Had he ever really made a place for himself in her life? Whether
+he had or not, he knew that he had never, even in his blackest moments,
+given her up. All the plans for his future centered still about her.
+Well, he had a fight before him now, and not until he won it would he
+make himself known at the house on Pine Street.
+
+On the corner a newsboy thrust a paper under his face. He waved it
+aside. "I can read all that bunk for nothing, sonny," he told him
+cheerfully. The huge head-lines filled him with a spiritual nausea. The
+chronicle of the day's tragedies for the public to batten upon! Was
+there never to be an end to America's greed for the sensational?
+
+At the St. Germaine the clerk handed him a telephone call. It was from
+Jarvis and urged him to call him up immediately. In his own room Kenwick
+complied with this request. The voice of the Southerner came to him,
+sharply commanding, over the wire. "Can you come around right away? I
+want to talk it over with you."
+
+"Talk what over?" Kenwick's voice was almost defiant.
+
+"Why, haven't you seen it? Well, come around anyway. I'll be here for
+the next hour."
+
+When Kenwick arrived at the Hartshire he found the photographer sorting
+over a pile of films. But as his guest entered, he swept these into a
+pasteboard box, and cleared off a chair for him. "Where have you been?"
+he demanded. "I called you at the hotel and the 'Clarion' office twice."
+
+Kenwick gave him a brief account of the last two hours. Jarvis grunted.
+"Well, I don't blame you for wanting to get the seal of scientific
+approval but--I can't believe that you haven't read the 'Record' yet.
+And you a newspaper man!"
+
+He fished the paper out from under a stack of developing-trays and
+searched the columns of the second page. "Remember what I suggested to
+you last night, that you let things take their own course for a while?
+Well, it seems that they've been taking them in rather a headlong
+fashion." He creased back the page and handed the paper to Kenwick.
+"Read that and see if it doesn't give you something of a jolt."
+
+He took the paper. The head-lines at the top of the third page riveted
+themselves upon his brain.
+
+                       RELATIVE SEEKS MISSING MAN
+
+             Body of Roger Kenwick to Be Exhumed at Mont-Mer
+
+     The body of Roger Kenwick, son of the late Charles Kenwick, of New
+     York, who died at Rest Hollow last November, is to be exhumed for
+     examination on the demand of Mrs. Hilda Fanwell, of Reno, Nevada.
+     Mrs. Fanwell, a widow, arrived from her home last week in search of
+     her brother, Ralph Regan, who has been a resident of Mont-Mer for
+     the last two years. A letter received from him in the early part of
+     November indicated, according to the sister's statement, that he
+     was in failing health. Being unable to come to him then, owing to
+     the illness of her husband, Mrs. Fanwell wrote several letters,
+     none of which were answered. The description of her brother, which
+     she furnished the police, has resulted in a demand to the
+     authorities to have the body of Roger Kenwick exhumed.
+
+Kenwick let the paper slide to the table. "My Lord!" he murmured.
+"Jarvis, what would you do about it?"
+
+"Why should _you_ do anything about it? This Fanwell woman is apparently
+the oldest Gold Dust twin. Let her do your work."
+
+But Kenwick's eyes were still fixed upon the paper. Over it a drop of
+acid from the developing-tray was eating a slow passage. "But to see my
+name tied up to a gruesome thing like that----Why, you can't imagine
+how it----It gives me the feeling that--that I've just begun on this
+thing. And I thought when I came in here that I had all the cards in my
+hands."
+
+He got up from the table slowly, like a hospital patient testing his
+strength on the first day out of bed. And Jarvis, after one glance at
+his pale face, rose too. "You've got nothing to worry about----," he
+began. But Kenwick waved the soothing aside with a fierce impatience.
+
+"Nothing to worry about?" he cried hotly. "Don't offer me that stuff,
+Jarvis. How do I know--how _can_ I ever know what I may have done during
+those ghastly ten months?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+When Kenwick entered the St. Germaine on the evening after his interview
+with Jarvis, a man rose from the farther corner of the lobby and came
+toward him. "Kenwick!" he cried, and held out his hand. "I thought you
+never would come. I've been waiting here an eternity." It was Clinton
+Morgan.
+
+When the first, somewhat incoherent greetings were over and the two men
+sat facing each other across Kenwick's untidy writing-table, a moment of
+embarrassed silence fell between them. Then, in a desperate attempt to
+start the conversation, "I'm afraid I've kept you waiting rather a long
+time," the host apologized.
+
+"You have," his caller agreed. "It's been more than a year, hasn't it?"
+He spoke in a cheerful, matter-of-fact tone as though a mere
+pleasure-trip had intervened between this and their last encounter. But
+Kenwick was looking at him intently.
+
+"You know--about it then?"
+
+"Yes, we know all about it." Clinton Morgan leaned over and put his
+hand affectionately upon the other man's shoulder. "And, by George,
+Kenwick, I congratulate you. I congratulate you from the bottom of my
+heart. It was one chance against a thousand that you could win out. It's
+a miracle!"
+
+Kenwick was scarcely conscious of the last sentences. His attention had
+stopped short at that word "we." He reached down and picked a burnt
+match from the carpet as he asked with a pathetic attempt at formal
+courtesy, "How is your sister?"
+
+"Getting well, I believe. She has been----Well, this case of yours is a
+most enthralling one, Kenwick. Anybody would be interested, but
+particularly any one who has known you. We have been following it with
+great interest."
+
+Kenwick looked at him incredulously. "How could you?"
+
+The caller shifted his position uneasily. "Well, that's rather a long
+story. And Marcreta might prefer to tell you part of it herself. And
+that brings me to my errand. I came here to ask you up to the house.
+We've just got the old place fixed over, and,"--he glanced at his
+watch,--"it's not nine o'clock yet. If you haven't something else on
+hand that----"
+
+Kenwick cut in almost harshly. "Are you sure that your sister would care
+to see me? That she wouldn't perhaps be--well, afraid of me?"
+
+Morgan laughed. "Well, I'll be there, you know, if you should get
+violent and begin throwing things around."
+
+But the other man's face did not relax. His voice came low and strained
+as though it were being let out cautiously under high gear. "You don't
+understand. Nobody can, I suppose, who hasn't been through this
+experience." His nervous hands stiffened upon the arms of the chair. "I
+tell you, Morgan, it's easier for a denizen of the underworld to live
+down her reputation and achieve a reputable place in society than for a
+man or woman to regain the confidence of the world after a period
+of----Well, I may as well out with the damned word--insanity."
+
+"Don't call it that, Kenwick. It wasn't that. In the trenches you got a
+blow that put you out of commission. But you were simply in a dazed
+condition; mental aberration beginning with melancholia. You were never
+violently insane; never dangerous to anybody else."
+
+"How do you know? How do I know? I've suffered the anguish of hell,
+wondering about it. Somebody may have been killed in that accident that
+restored me to life. It may have been all my fault. I don't know. I've
+spent the last month trying to find out in a quiet way. I suppose you
+think I'm a coward for not going at it more directly." He looked at his
+companion with a defiant appeal in his eyes. "But there were reasons why
+I didn't want to kick up a lot of notoriety about myself. For any harm
+that ever came to man or woman through me, I'm eager to pay. No court
+decision would have to make me do it; no court decision could keep me
+from doing it. But I wanted to save my name if I could. I wanted to save
+my name so that some time it might be fit----"
+
+"I know." Clinton Morgan interrupted hastily. The memory of that
+traitorous bit of paper which he had discovered in the gold and ivory
+book came back to him and brought a guilty flush to his cheeks. Whether
+he would or no, he seemed to hold in his own hands all the threads of
+this tragic romance. A line of Marcreta's lyric drifted through his
+brain:
+
+    Whence thy _uneasy_ spirit may depart?
+
+How well that word had been chosen to describe and conceal the living
+death which this man had suffered!
+
+"You see," Kenwick went on, "I'm the spiritual counterpart of the Man
+Without a Country. I don't belong anywhere. And, more than that, I'm a
+charge on the public conscience. Everybody who knows about my period
+of--of incompetency belongs to an unofficial vigilance committee, whose
+duty it is to warn society against me."
+
+Clinton groped for a reply, but words would not come. And the fact that
+there was no bitterness in the other man's voice, but only the level
+monotony which is achieved by long suppression, made it infinitely
+pathetic.
+
+"If it suited your whim to do so," Kenwick continued, "you might reverse
+the usual order of dining; begin with pie and end with soup. And the
+public would regard it either as a new cure for dyspepsia or an
+eccentricity of genius. But if I should try it, somebody would
+immediately suggest that I shouldn't be allowed at large. It's the irony
+of fate that I, who have always had a contempt for the trivial
+conventions of life (such a contempt that my sister-in-law never quite
+trusted me in polite society), should now be in a cowering bondage to
+them. I live all my days in a horror of doing something that might
+appear erratic. And I spend the nights going back over every inch
+of the road to see if I have. Why don't the adherents of the
+fire-and-brimstone theory picture hell as a place where we can never act
+on impulse? As a place which dooms us forever to a hideous
+self-consciousness?"
+
+Clinton Morgan spoke with a sort of angry championship. "You've had
+tough luck, my boy, the toughest kind of luck. But you've come out of it
+all right. By George, you can show the world now that you've come out on
+top."
+
+"I haven't come out; that's just the trouble. I'll never be out of the
+woods until I've accounted for them. Did you read last night's paper,
+Morgan?"
+
+"Yes. That's one thing that brought me here. Let me tell you something,
+Kenwick. Until about a week ago we thought you were dead. And we were
+relieved, for we felt that it was a happy release for you; your only way
+out. And then one day, not long ago, we got a clue." He still clung to
+the plural pronoun. "We fell over a clue, you might say, which aroused
+our suspicions--and we followed it down."
+
+"You followed it down!" Kenwick cried. "You cared enough about it for
+that?"
+
+His friend's reply came through guarded lips. "You have suffered
+horribly during these past months," he said. "But you are not the only
+one who has suffered."
+
+Kenwick glanced at him sharply. Then he seemed to sense the delicacy of
+the other man's position. "It's just this," Kenwick explained after a
+moment of silence. "Since this--this thing fell on me, I instinctively
+divide all people into two classes; those who knew me before it
+happened, and those who have only known me since. With the second group
+I'm always wondering if they are still unsuspecting: with the first, I'm
+wondering if they will ever be convinced. But go on with your story.
+What did you do about the clue?"
+
+"I'll tell you about that later. It's enough to say right now that
+Richard Glover----"
+
+"Glover!" The word seemed to explode from Kenwick's lips. He leaped to
+his feet. "That's the name!" he cried. "That's the name that I've been
+groping after for two days. Sometimes I almost had it and then it would
+escape me. I had an idea fixed in my mind somehow that it began with a
+'B.' Why, I saw that fellow at the theater the other night, Morgan. It
+was a most curious thing, for as soon as my eyes lighted on him the
+vacuum in my mind was suddenly filled. I remember traveling across the
+continent with him. I remember my brother Everett introducing me to him
+one day at home before I came West this last time. That's all I do
+remember about him, but it sort of connects things in my brain. I wanted
+to talk to him the other night and see if he couldn't help me clear
+things up, but when I got down to his seat, he was gone. I don't know
+whether he had recognized me too or not. But even so, I can't account
+for his wanting to avoid me. I haven't got anything against him. I might
+have thought the whole thing was a hallucination (for I never quite
+trust my own senses now), but I had a reliable witness. Now what I want
+to know is, why should Glover be afraid to meet me?"
+
+"If you'll come up to the house," Morgan suggested again, "we may be
+able to straighten out some of these things."
+
+When they arrived, a few minutes later, at the Pine Street home, Clinton
+lingered outside fussing with the engine of his car, and Roger Kenwick
+went alone to meet Marcreta. He found her in the fire-lighted
+living-room where he had parted from her, and she came to greet him with
+that slow grace that he knew so well, and that seemed now to stop the
+beating of his heart. But if either of them had expected the first
+moments of reunion to melt away the shadows that lay between them, they
+were disappointed. For the fires of memory burn deep. And the ghastly
+suffering with which the two years of separation had been freighted had
+left marks that were not to be obliterated by those words of carefully
+casual welcome. In spite of their efforts at commonplace dialogue, they
+spoke to each other in the subdued voices of those who converse in the
+presence of death. By tacit consent they avoided, during the first
+half-hour, all mention of the tragedy which had separated them.
+
+"We've just had the house done over," Marcreta was saying as her brother
+entered. "During the war it was a sanitarium, and although it has all
+been retinted and there are new hangings everywhere, Clinton says it
+still smells of anesthetics. I tell him it's only his imagination. Do
+you get any odor of ether?"
+
+"No," Kenwick answered.
+
+He found talking horribly difficult. This woman, for whom his soul had
+yearned, seemed now to be looking at him from across a deep chasm.
+Between them stretched the bramble-bush; a tangle of underbrush; stark
+sycamore-trees that rattled hideously in the winter wind; uprooted
+madrone bushes stretching distorted claws heavenward in a mute appeal
+for vengeance. And insistently now the question beat against his
+brain--had he ever succeeded in crossing that ravine? Would he ever
+really succeed in crossing it? With the clutch of desperation he clung
+to the verdict of Dr. Gregson Bennet, as he had once clung for support
+to those grim, high-backed chairs at Rest Hollow. He recalled having
+once read the story of an ex-convict coming home after his release from
+the penitentiary to meet that most crucial of all punishments; the eyes
+of the woman that he loved. To his supersensitive soul, the stigma
+attached to him was something that was worse than crime; a thing that
+branded deeper and more indelibly. That it had come to him in the
+discharge of duty weighed not a jot on his account-sheet. He told
+himself that it had been a judgment. He had always been a worshiper of
+intellect. It had seemed to him the one enduring possession. And now it
+had proved itself even more ephemeral than physical health. As his eyes
+rested upon her, unconscious of their own sadness, he knew all at once
+that Marcreta understood and was trying to make it easy for him.
+
+"The only way to make this easy for me," he heard himself saying
+suddenly, "is to drag it out into the light. As long as the past lies
+shrouded between us, we will never be able to forget it."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was eleven o'clock when Kenwick went down the steps of the Morgan
+home. He refused Clinton's invitation to ride back in the car. For he
+wanted to walk, to walk on and on forever in the glorious starlight.
+There were no stars. A gray fog had rolled in from the bay and spread
+itself like a huge blotter across the heavens. But he was unaware of it.
+Even the street lights, shining dimly as through frosted glass, seemed
+to shed across his path a supernatural radiance. For although no word of
+love had passed between him and Marcreta Morgan, he had come away from
+that visit with a wild happiness surging in his heart. There had been no
+effort to reëstablish life upon its old basis. Marcreta, with what
+seemed to him an almost superhuman tact, had divined the ghastly
+futility of such an endeavor. And instead she had conveyed to him, by
+some indescribable method of her own, the assurance that she would
+welcome, with unquestioning faith, the opening of a new and happier era.
+As he had sat there in the comfort of that living-room, where on a
+night, not long ago, he had caught a glint of a departed glory, desire
+and something finer had struggled for supremacy in his soul. But
+courageous self-analysis had driven home to him the realization that he
+had Marcreta Morgan at a cruel disadvantage. Whether he would or no, he
+had come back to her clothed in the appealing garments of tragedy. He
+was a pensioner on her sympathy, and in her eagerness to restore to him
+his lost heritage, she had unconsciously disarmed herself. The
+temptation to cherish and set a jealous guard upon such an advantage has
+overpowered men and women innumerable. Kenwick sensed the treacherous
+sweetness of it flooding his heart like the seductive fragrance of some
+rare perfume, and then in a sudden fury he tore himself free of it.
+
+"By God! I haven't got as deep in as that!" he muttered, and was
+unconscious that he said the words aloud. "I haven't sunk so deep that
+I'd pull myself up that way!" He buttoned his overcoat about him
+conscious for the first time of the chill breeze. Not yet, he reminded
+himself sharply, not yet did he have the right to conquer.
+
+As he took the intersecting street to cut the steep down-hill slope to
+the hotel, he heard the echo of footsteps behind him. He quickened his
+gait, impatient of any distracting element, and was instantly aware
+that the other footsteps had quickened theirs. For half a block he
+walked at a round pace. Then he stopped short and waited for the other
+pedestrian to overtake him. A thick-set man in a black overcoat passed
+him, slowed down to a creeping walk, and under the feeble light of the
+corner street-lamp came to a halt. Kenwick glanced at him sharply, but
+the man was a stranger to him. He passed on unaccosted, but as he was
+stepping from the curb the stranger loomed up suddenly behind him.
+"Stop!" he commanded.
+
+Kenwick turned. A heavy hand was laid upon his arm. He stood waiting,
+under the gleam of the bleary light, detained more by curiosity than by
+the grip upon his arm. From the burly figure came a burly voice. "You
+are Roger Kenwick."
+
+It was not a question, but the other man gave it sharp-voiced response.
+"Yes. What is it to you?"
+
+"A good deal to me. I've been waiting for you. Some people wouldn't have
+waited, but I'm a gentleman and I let you have your visit out with the
+lady. We'll take, the rest of the walk together. Beastly night, isn't
+it?"
+
+Kenwick did not move, and his voice was more astonished than resentful.
+"I think you've made a mistake in your man. You say you have been
+waiting for me?"
+
+The burly man began to walk slowly away and Kenwick fell into step
+beside him. "Ye-a, I've been waiting for you. And even if I hadn't been,
+I might have got suspicious a minute or so ago. Let me give you a tip
+for your own good; don't talk to yourself in public. It's a bad habit
+for anybody in your line of trade."
+
+Kenwick stopped short. "What do you mean?"
+
+"I mean, Mr. Kenwick, that you are under arrest."
+
+The slanting pavement seemed suddenly to be moving of its own accord and
+Kenwick felt it carrying him along as though he were on an escalator.
+Then he heard himself ask dully, "What for?"
+
+The officer looked bored. But he stood there waiting in grim patience
+for his companion to regain the power of locomotion. "I asked you what
+for?" Kenwick repeated sharply. "You've made a mistake, but you've got
+to answer that question. If I'm going to be hauled into jail, the law
+gives me the right to know why."
+
+"Oh, cut it out!" the other admonished. "You're surprised all right;
+they always are. But I'll say this for you, Mr. Kenwick, there's nothing
+amateurish about your work. Plans all laid to make a quiet getaway East,
+but no dodging around cheap lodging-houses for yours. Business as usual,
+and friends kept happy and unsuspecting; everything strictly on the
+level. You know as well as I do why I'm on your track. You're wanted for
+murder--for the murder of Ralph Regan."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+In the twelve hours that intervened between Roger Kenwick's arrest and
+his transference to the authorities at Mont-Mer, he was not allowed to
+see any one. As rigid a watch was kept beside his cell as though he were
+a hardened criminal who had on previous occasions escaped the clutches
+of justice. Even reporters were denied admittance, but he was permitted,
+in courtesy to his former position as journalist, to read the papers. In
+these he found, spread large upon the front pages, highly colored
+stories concerning his manoeuvers and final capture. Only the
+"Clarion's" story was conservative and hinted at a colossal mistake
+which would lead later to more sensational developments.
+
+When he left San Francisco, heavily hand-cuffed, a crowd followed to the
+depot. The trip down the coast was uneventful, and he sat staring out of
+the window, recalling his former ride through that same country when the
+pruners had waved their shears to him in a sort of voiceless Godspeed.
+There were no pruners visible from the car-window now, and the stark
+stretches of orchard looked bleak and desolate. The bare, tangled
+branches of the roadside poplars showed against the dull January sky
+like intricate designs of lacework. They seemed to Kenwick to have lost
+the comforting warmth of their leaves just when they needed them most.
+
+It was almost dusk when the train drew into Mont-Mer, and here another
+crowd was waiting. The engine appeared to plow its way through them.
+Never had the quiet little city been so stirred. Never in all its
+decorous history had the white spot-light of sensationalism played upon
+it. It knew that its name was featured in every newspaper of the
+country.
+
+And Kenwick found the Mont-Mer papers even more lavish in descriptive
+detail than those of the city had been. There was a picture of the
+murdered man and one of himself spread upon the front page of the
+evening sheet, and below, a cut of Rest Hollow, with the inevitable
+black cross marking the spot under the dining-room window where the body
+of Ralph Regan had been found. The morning daily matched this with a
+picture of the handsome Kenwick home in New York, and an account of the
+death, the previous spring, of Everett Kenwick and his wife, victims of
+influenza. As he read, Kenwick reflected that Richard Glover must have
+been very busy, very busy indeed since the night that they had
+encountered each other at the theater.
+
+And outside the county jail the city buzzed with comment and
+speculation. Mont-Mer real estate men were elated over this unexpected
+scandal in high society which had resulted in putting their town "on the
+map." Better a gruesome publicity, they told each other, than no
+publicity at all. Tourists from Los Angeles and the near-by towns
+motored up during the week-end and made futile attempts to gain access
+to Rest Hollow. The old conservative residents of the aristocratic
+little city were horrified, and the colony of Eastern capitalists, who
+made up a large part of the suburban population, were hotly resentful of
+the hideous notoriety which had invaded their retreat by the sea. The
+two country estates that bordered Rest Hollow were put on the market at
+what the local realty dealers advertised as "spectacular bargains."
+
+After the body of Ralph Regan had been exhumed and identified by the
+grief-stricken little woman who was his sister, the links of the chain
+which incriminated Kenwick seemed to fall of their own volition into
+place. He reviewed them himself, sitting alone in Mont-Mer's bleak
+little jail.
+
+There would be first the testimony of the coroner who would describe the
+gunshot wound. And then the evidence that he, Kenwick, had been armed on
+that fatal night. The woman, or whoever it was that occupied the right
+wing of the house, would narrate in detail all that he had said about
+being a good shot and would doubtless follow this with the testimony
+that he was obviously looking for trouble. The revolver, which he had
+left on the table in the den, would add its mute confirmation of these
+assertions. And his own mode of departure from that house, under such
+circumstances, was sufficient in itself to send him to the electric
+chair without any further testimony. Glover would be, of course, the
+star witness for the State, and against his glib and convincing story
+would be pitted the word of a man known to have been of an unsound state
+of mind and never proved to have recovered from it. It was this last
+evidence, he knew, that would acquit him. With the brand of Cain upon
+his forehead he would be set free. The ghastly notoriety which he had
+striven, with the difficult patience of the impatient temperament, to
+avoid, had struck him with the force of a bomb and blown him skyward to
+be the cynosure of every eye. Never while the world stood could he ask
+Marcreta Morgan to take the name of Kenwick. Acquittal on any terms was
+all that most men would have asked of fate. But Kenwick was made of
+finer stuff. And so far as his future was concerned, he was already
+tried, convicted, and sentenced.
+
+A week intervened between his arrival at Mont-Mer and the day set for
+the trial. During that time he knew himself to be under the most
+relentless surveillance. By day and by night his every act was watched.
+With his food they brought him neither knife nor fork. On the second day
+of this startling omission he smiled grimly at the attendant. "You can
+tell the jailer," he said, "that he needn't be worried about me to that
+extent. You see, I've worn my country's uniform, and that spoils a man
+for taking the Dutch route."
+
+The stolid-faced attendant looked at him without replying. Kenwick felt
+a sudden pity for him. "I suppose he thinks I'm likely to get violent
+and begin smashing up things at any moment," he reflected. For in the
+jailer's eyes was that thing for which he had been on the watch for
+almost two months. He pushed away his food almost untasted. When he was
+left alone again he walked over to the heavily barred window and stood
+looking down at the court-house garden. Very gently he shook one of the
+iron rods. "For almost a year," he muttered. "Barred in for almost a
+year; and the world has no intention of ever letting me forget it."
+
+The date-palms in the grounds below swept the wintry air with long
+graceful plumes. How helpless they were in the driving force of the
+wind! And yet they were moored to something, securely rooted. The storm
+might buffet but would not utterly destroy them. Down the curving path
+which they bordered he saw a man approaching with a flat leather case
+under his arm. It was Dayton, the young attorney whom the court had
+appointed for his defense. Kenwick, who had taken his intellectual
+measure at their first meeting the day before, had little faith in his
+legal ability. But he liked him; liked his buoyant, unspoiled
+personality. And Dayton was undisguisedly elated over this sudden
+opportunity to try his mettle in so conspicuous a case. It was the
+chance he had been hoping for during three years of commonplace
+practice.
+
+As the prisoner heard his step in the upper corridor he turned from the
+window. Dayton closed the portal behind him and sat down on the edge of
+the narrow cot. Downstairs he had just held brief parley with the
+jailer. "Hasn't Kenwick got any family?" he had inquired.
+
+The official shook his head. "As I understand it, he didn't have anybody
+but a brother, and he died last spring, the papers said."
+
+"No friends either?"
+
+"Friends? Well, he wouldn't be likely to have any, would he--a feller
+that's been crazy?"
+
+"It's cursed luck!" Dayton had told him. He was still young enough to
+feel resentful of life's contemptuous injustices. "And he's only
+twenty-five; got his whole life before him. He's got to have his chance.
+He's got to have a fighting chance."
+
+As he looked at his client now, he was careful to keep anything like
+compassion out of his eyes. He removed a cracked pitcher full of purple
+asters from its perilous position at the head of the bed and swept his
+glance over the crude table littered with envelopes in cream and pastel
+shades. "Correspondence still growing?" he inquired genially.
+
+Kenwick stacked the vari-colored missives into a pile. Most of them had
+been accompanied by flowers, and all were signed by society women of
+Mont-Mer. A few bore the more guarded signature of "A Friend," or "A
+Sympathizer," with initials underneath. They condoled, they admonished,
+they even made cautious love.
+
+"Can you fathom it, Dayton?" the prisoner asked, weighing the
+correspondence in one hand as though the answer to the riddle lay in
+avoir-dupois. "These women think I'm guilty of murder. They all seem to
+think I'm guilty as hell; and yet they send me flowers, and
+love-letters." He turned his back contemptuously upon the purple asters.
+"It comes over me every once in a while, Dayton, that I'm not the only
+person in this world who has had moments of mental aberration."
+
+The other man reached over, took up the stack of envelopes, and examined
+them with curious interest. Here and there he recognized a coat of arms
+or a monogram. "Going to answer any of them?" he queried.
+
+"Answer them!"
+
+"Well, most of them seem to expect a reply. You see, you really can't
+blame them very much, either. These women are fed up on life. They come
+out here every winter seeking a new sensation."
+
+"And I am a new sensation, am I?"
+
+"You bet you are! Why, man, you're nothing short of a godsend. And most
+of these people," he swept a hand over the coterie represented on the
+table, "are from New York themselves. They're not writing to a stranger
+exactly. They know who your family is--or was. They know all about you."
+
+Kenwick's lips stiffened. "Well, they certainly have that advantage over
+me."
+
+"I don't mean to imply, of course, that they've been investigating your
+personal history," Dayton hastened to explain. "But Kenwick is not an
+inconspicuous name in the East. And then you've been in the service
+and----"
+
+"I'm glad you mentioned that," the prisoner cut in. "It reminds me of
+something I want to say to you. When you get up to talk in court, don't
+you make any plea for me on the grounds that I've been in the service.
+That's one thing I won't stand for. The man who was in the army is a
+different man from the alleged murderer of Ralph Regan. I'm not going to
+have _his_ record smeared with this horrible thing."
+
+Dayton dropped the letters to the table as though they had bitten him.
+"Why, Mr. Kenwick! You've got a right to the consideration that would
+naturally----"
+
+"If I've got a right to it, I've got a right to waive it. This country
+is flooded with men who expect to beat their way all through life on the
+plea that they've been in the service. And there's nothing so despicable
+on God's earth as that. I use my uniform to fight in, not to hide in.
+Get me?"
+
+Dayton was obviously crestfallen. He got up from the hard cot and stood
+looking at his client gravely. Kenwick gathered up the pile of
+envelopes. "Take this junk out of here when you go, please. And don't
+let them send in any more flowers. They can save those for the funeral.
+But I'm not dead yet."
+
+"You may be very soon, though, if you don't listen to sense," his
+adviser remarked bluntly. "I haven't wanted to get you worked up over
+the case, because that's poor policy and it doesn't buy us anything. But
+it strikes me, Mr. Kenwick, that you don't realize what a very serious
+position you are in."
+
+The ghost of a smile appeared upon the prisoner's face. It was a
+terrible little smile, and he was not even conscious of its existence.
+He was only conscious that every nerve in his body ached with weariness
+and that he felt faint from want of food. Two pictures were stamping
+themselves alternately upon his brain; the dim, sinister interior of
+Rest Hollow, and the fire-lighted room on Pine Street. One of these
+incessantly erased and superseded the other. And he knew that there
+could be no division of their supremacy. Only one of them might survive.
+Day and night the memory of them racked his jaded brain. For the
+humiliation of his present position, not the ultimate outcome of the
+trial, burned him with a consuming flame.
+
+As he stood now at the barred window, he was doing that thing to which,
+ever since his arrest, all his energies had been directed. Hour by hour,
+minute by minute, he was welding together the joints of an armor. With a
+slow but ceaseless persistence he was girding himself with a
+graven-faced indifference that must be his shield against the barrage of
+the gaping, curious world. And this man, standing so close beside him,
+and in reality so far away that their spirits were scarcely discernible
+to each other in the distance was telling him that he seemed unaware of
+the peril of his position. That wave of deafening depression which
+engulfs the human soul in the moments when it realizes its utter
+loneliness surged over him like a tidal wave. He stood looking at Dayton
+and wondering what manner of man he was.
+
+"I don't want to play up anything now that will sound like dramatics,"
+the lawyer went on in a soothing voice. "But we've got to face this
+thing as it is. You know Glover, don't you?"
+
+"No. But Glover knows me. He has that immense advantage. And he is using
+it to the full. He has been fighting a man who's got both hands tied
+behind him."
+
+Dayton appeared to take new courage from this summary. "Well, I see
+you've got a line on his methods anyway, and that's something. That
+gives us our starting-point. And besides having both hands free, he's
+also got his eyes open. You've been blindfolded a part of the time. He
+never has."
+
+There was a sound of a key grating in the lock. The dialogue ended
+abruptly and Kenwick turned from the window. On the threshold was a
+shabby, faded-looking little woman guarded by the relentless sentry.
+Kenwick advanced to meet her, apologizing for the discomfort of the
+backless chair which he offered.
+
+"No, I don't want to sit down, thanks," she told him hurriedly. "I'm not
+goin' to stay but a minute." She twisted her ungloved hands nervously
+together under a scrawny wool scarf. "It's just this, Mr. Kenwick; I
+asked them to let me come just to tell you this----"
+
+The prisoner stood waiting. The realization came to him that she was
+afraid of him, and he tried to help her to begin. "You are Mrs. Fanwell,
+aren't you?"
+
+"Yes. But--you don't know me, do you?"
+
+"No, I just guessed at who you were." His eyes rested compassionately
+upon her thin, eager face, her poverty-stricken mourning. She was
+obviously relieved at his quiet composure. "I just wanted to tell you
+this; that it's not revenge that I'm after. I've had a hard life, any
+way you look at it. But I'm in Science now and I'm tryin' to tear hate
+out of my heart. I haven't got any hard feelin's against you, for I
+don't believe, I never will believe that you really meant to do it."
+
+"Won't you sit down?" Kenwick suggested, and forced her gently into the
+chair. Then he stood beside her, one hand resting upon the
+paper-littered table. "You believe, do you, that I--am responsible for
+your brother's death?"
+
+She was looking past him, through the narrow window where Dayton stood
+watching her curiously. "I don't know just what to think. But I wanted
+you to know that I'm not wishin' you--any violent end. I never dreamed
+there was anything so horrible connected with his death when I came out
+here. But I felt that I had to know about him; I had to find out."
+
+"Of course you had to find out," Kenwick agreed earnestly. "This thing
+must be cleared up in your mind--in everybody's mind. May I ask you a
+personal question, Mrs. Fanwell, to help me clear up a part of it
+myself? Were you dependent upon your brother to any degree for your
+support?"
+
+"Dependent on _Ralph_?" The astonishment in her tone was sufficient
+reply in itself. "Oh, no. I was tryin' to help Ralph out, as much as I
+could without lettin' my husband know. It was hard, havin' always to
+stand between them. But I couldn't blame my husband either. He was
+always hard-workin' himself and he hadn't any patience with poor Ralph.
+He thought he ought to get a steady job at carpentry; that was his
+trade, and he made good at it till he got sick and began takin' that
+terrible stuff. It was the ruin of him."
+
+"You mean that he took--drugs?"
+
+She nodded. And Kenwick hastened to cover the pitiful little secret
+which he had laid bare.
+
+"It was only for this reason that I asked, Mrs. Fanwell. If I am proved
+guilty of this crime, you shall receive whatever money recompense it is
+in my power to give. This is not an attempt to pay for it, but only to
+ease my own conscience."
+
+The woman's eyes filled with tears. She leaned beseechingly across the
+table, clutching, with strange incongruity, one of the perfumed
+envelopes. "Then you _are_ guilty!" she cried. "Oh, Mr. Kenwick, why
+don't you confess? All the lawyers have told me that if you confess,
+they can't give you the death sentence. And you hadn't ought to be
+in--in a place like this. Now that I've seen you I know that what the
+others say isn't so. You did it when you was crazy. You never would have
+done it if you had been in your right mind."
+
+She rose and moved slowly toward the door, her gaze still fixed upon him
+with a mixture of pleading and horror. He followed, and opened the door
+himself. "I'm glad you came, Mrs. Fanwell. It was very kind indeed of
+you to come."
+
+She stopped with her hand upon the knob. "I don't care what he says,"
+she told him tremulously. "I don't care what anybody says; they can't
+none of them make me believe that you would have done it if you'd known
+what you was about."
+
+When she had gone Kenwick drew a long sigh. The thing had come near to
+shattering his laboriously constructed mask. He spoke sharply to the man
+at the window. "What in the world did she mean by that, Dayton? They're
+certainly not trying to make her believe that I killed her brother when
+I was in my right mind?"
+
+Dayton took a few slow steps toward him. "I was trying to lead up to
+that when she came in. But it's just as well to have had you get it from
+her. Now maybe you'll take more stock in it. That is exactly what
+they're trying to make her think; what they'll try to make the court
+think. Glover is going to try to prove (and he'll come within an ace of
+doing it, too) that when you were in your right mind you deliberately
+plotted to kill that man. He has the witnesses and the motive, and the
+thing that he's going to attempt to saddle upon you, Mr. Kenwick
+is--murder in the first degree."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+On the day set for the trial of the Regan murder case the court-room at
+Mont-Mer was crowded. Long before ten o'clock men and women were
+flocking into the building, eager for the most desirable seats.
+Residents from some of the country districts brought their lunches and
+prepared to spend the day.
+
+The court-house was an antique structure heated only by wood stoves, but
+the fur-coated and the threadbare rubbed elbows and were oblivious of
+drafts. For it is in the audience chamber of a criminal court that those
+who seek will find the true democracy. One touch of sensation makes the
+whole world kin.
+
+A few hours before the trial Clinton Morgan arrived in town and was
+permitted to see the prisoner. The vigilance of the Mont-Mer officials
+did not preclude visitors, rather welcomed them as a possible means of
+gaining valuable information from the suspected murderer when he was off
+his guard. Dayton, who was in conference with his client when Clinton
+entered, was immensely relieved by the appearance of this new actor in
+the drama. "This thing seems to me to be a little too one-sided,
+professor," he remarked when introductions were over. "The court-room
+over there is jammed with people who expect to see us done to death.
+It's good to have an ally loom up in the offing."
+
+He left them alone for a few moments while they waited for the sheriff,
+and Clinton measured his friend with an anxious eye. "I don't know what
+you could have thought of me for not coming sooner," he said, "but I
+couldn't possibly get away. You look all in, man. Haven't they been
+giving you anything to eat?"
+
+"As much as I wanted." As he returned the grip of his hand, Kenwick was
+wondering if Clinton Morgan suspected that this encounter, in a prison
+cell, between himself and the brother of Marcreta filled his cup of
+humiliation to the brim. Her name was not mentioned by either of them.
+Clinton's whole attention was centered upon the developments in the
+case.
+
+"You're not going to take the stand yourself, are you, Kenwick?" he
+questioned, standing with one foot upon the backless chair.
+
+"I was, but Dayton has advised against it."
+
+"Absolutely. You'd be at an immense disadvantage."
+
+"I suppose so. I can furnish proof from Dr. Gregson Bennet, in the city,
+that I'm perfectly normal now. But after all, that doesn't really count
+for much with anybody but myself. It was such an immense comfort to me
+when he made the examination. I came away from his office feeling that
+it was going to clear up everything. But no matter what science says,
+I'll always be at a disadvantage."
+
+Clinton laid a hand upon his shoulder. Ever since his first sight of him
+he had been trying to conceal the fact that Kenwick's altered appearance
+was a shock to him. And like the attempts of most straightforward men,
+the effort had been a failure. "Why, buck up, man," he admonished now.
+"They can't convict you, you know; not under--the circumstances. You
+haven't been thinking that?"
+
+"I've been thinking a good many things since I came back to Mont-Mer,"
+Kenwick answered slowly. "You see, Morgan, I know more now than I did
+when I was trying to ferret this thing out up in the city. For one
+thing, I know a little more about my adversary. As I've figured out this
+story now, it goes something like this.
+
+"After that adventure out at Rest Hollow, Glover found himself in a
+hole. But there were three ways out of it for him. If he wanted to
+retain the grip that I think he has upon my estate, he had to choose
+between these. The first one was to make it appear that I was dead. This
+seems, at first thought, to be a hazardous venture, but it was not so
+difficult in my case as it would have been under normal circumstances.
+And when he first decided to take it I think he supposed that I was
+dead. He had every reason to think so. The man to whom he had entrusted
+me had mysteriously disappeared, and he had some strange woman come down
+and identify as himself a stranger who had been killed in an automobile
+tragedy; a very easy thing, in reality, you see. When Glover discovered,
+upon inquiry around town, that there had been such an accident, he
+concluded that I had been killed and that the man who was responsible
+for it was afraid to let him know and had made his escape after having
+himself declared dead. I haven't a doubt that Glover thought I was the
+man who was shipped up to San Francisco in a casket. And believing this,
+the whole thing seemed to play right into his hands. He knew, of course,
+that he couldn't keep his hold on my fortune forever, but he wanted to
+play the game until he got as much as he could out of it.
+
+"But suddenly he discovered, by some means, that his whole hypothesis
+was wrong. He discovered that I was alive, and what was infinitely more
+appalling, that I was apparently restored to competency. He had been
+willing to risk my possible reappearance, you see, for if I were ever
+discovered wandering about deranged somewhere, I would have no means of
+identifying myself and, after a medical examination, would simply be
+committed to some institution. He would not have to connect himself with
+that at all. But since I had come to life mentally as well as
+physically, he had to take the second course--prove me irresponsible and
+have me sent to an asylum. How he went about this I don't know, but I'm
+sure that he must have attempted it. And I don't know either why he
+failed, for as I look back now upon some of my moves I can see that they
+might have appeared--erratic."
+
+"I think," Clinton told him dryly, "that any of us could furnish
+convincing proof that we have been, at certain periods of our lives,
+dangerous to the public safety."
+
+But Kenwick went on, unheeding this attempted solace.
+
+"At any rate, Glover apparently failed in this attempt. So in order to
+get himself out of this mess, there is only one thing now for him to
+do." He broke off, eying his visitor with somber eyes. "You know what
+that is, Morgan. In order to save himself, he must prove me to be a
+cold-blooded murderer. Can he do it? Why shouldn't he? I'm certainly not
+in a position to offer any convincing opposition. A contemptuous pity is
+what I have read in the eyes of every person whom I've seen since this
+thing came to light. I don't suppose there is a person in this town who
+thinks I am innocent. I don't know whether Dayton himself does."
+
+"But what motive could you have had for murder, Kenwick? You say that
+you never saw this Regan in your life."
+
+"_I_ say so, but what does my testimony amount to? And especially what
+does it amount to when I am trying to save my own skin? I told you once,
+Morgan, and I tell you again that it's impossible for a man to live down
+my sort of a past. He may get his eyes back out of the bramble-bush, but
+he'll never be able to make the world believe that he can really see
+with them. I feel sorry for Dayton. He's working day and night on this
+case, and he's a nice fellow. But he hasn't got any chance to make good
+on it. I feel sorry for him."
+
+"I have been thinking," Clinton mused, "that there might be something
+out at Rest Hollow that would furnish a clue to help solve the question
+to the satisfaction of the jury, as to just when you arrived at that
+house, how long you stayed, and so on."
+
+"The place is full of clues, of course," Kenwick admitted. "But by this
+time they have all been carefully arranged. Dayton went out there, and
+he told me that the public are not being admitted to the grounds at all.
+The place is under guard night and day. There may be danger there for
+Glover; I don't know anything about that, of course, but he knows. And
+whatever else you may say about him, you can't say that he has been
+asleep on this job."
+
+The door opened to admit the sheriff. He shook hands with Clinton Morgan
+and nodded to Kenwick. In absolute silence the trio walked through the
+semitropical grounds to the court-house. As they entered the packed
+audience chamber the buzz of conversation stopped, and in deathly
+silence Roger Kenwick took his place.
+
+The barrage of eyes leveled upon him was only partly visible through the
+haze that for the first few moments blurred his vision. He told himself
+that it was like that last charge, through blinding smoke, that he had
+made across No-Man's-Land. Then the scene cleared and individual faces
+emerged from the mist. There were the weather-beaten faces of ranch
+workers, the smug, complacent faces of those whom life has petted, the
+resolute faces of those who have come to see grim justice administered.
+Among them, here and there, was a scattering of veiled faces; women
+eager to see, but ashamed of being seen. Kenwick wondered contemptuously
+if some of the writers of the perfumed notes were among these.
+
+During his dispassionate survey of the spectators he was acutely
+conscious of the presence of a man sitting at the far end of the table
+around which the lawyers were assembled. He had felt this personality
+when he first entered, but had reserved his attention until the blur of
+his surroundings should clear. Now he turned slowly in his chair and
+looked straight into the "tiger eyes" of Richard Glover. There was
+neither anger nor appeal in his own face; only a curious, questioning
+expression. An anthropologist who has stumbled upon some strange human
+relic unknown to his research might wear such an expression. Any
+physiognomist could have read in Kenwick's gaze the question, "What is
+this all about?"
+
+And here again his adversary had him at a disadvantage. For his was not
+the mobile temperament which gives visible response to its emotional
+experiences. Life played upon Kenwick as upon a highly strung
+instrument, and drew from him whatever notes she needed in the universal
+symphony. But Richard Glover permitted no hand but his own to manipulate
+the keys of his life-board.
+
+It was ten o'clock now but the trial seemed long in beginning. The judge
+had barely noticed Kenwick's entrance and continued an inaudible
+conversation with some one at his high desk. The district attorney, a
+florid little man who seemed to find difficulty in keeping on his
+eye-glasses, fussed with a mass of papers at the end of the long table
+and spoke occasionally to the bald-headed man on his right, who was
+evidently his colleague. Dayton leaned back in his chair and tapped the
+table impatiently with his pencil. Kenwick was surprised to see that the
+nervousness which his attorney had shown when he had visited him in jail
+seemed now to have completely disappeared.
+
+There was an eminent surgeon among Kenwick's New York acquaintances who
+suffered from a nervous malady that was akin to palsy, and yet who, in
+the vital crisis of an operation, had a hand as steady as an embedded
+rock. He found himself wondering curiously now whether Dayton would
+develop under pressure an abnormal sagacity. Some miracle would have to
+intervene if he was to be saved from the ravenous clutches of fate.
+
+Other persons were entering the court-room now and taking places that
+had evidently been reserved for them. Dayton leaned over and presented
+them at long distance to his client. "That fellow that just came in is
+Gifford, the undertaker. He got the jolt of his life when this thing
+blew up. Don't think he'll be much of a witness. He gets rattled. That
+chap with him is Dr. Markham. Ever see him before?"
+
+Kenwick nodded. "He bandaged my leg that night in the drug-store. He'll
+remember it, too, for he was a little suspicious at the time that the
+sprain was older than I admitted. And I think he knew the man whose name
+I chanced to give as mine."
+
+"Yes, that was a bad break, your chancing upon the name of Rogers. A
+fellow by that name was visiting out at the Paddington place, and
+although the doctor had never seen him, he had an engagement to play
+golf with him that afternoon out at the country club. Fortunately the
+man himself left town the next day so it wasn't as bad as it might have
+been. But it was an unfortunate thing, such a beast of a thing, that you
+should have given an assumed name at all."
+
+"I suppose so. But that one seemed safe enough; it was my own name
+backwards. And I'd been through enough during the last twenty-four hours
+to make me cautious and secretive. And as it turned out, the taking of
+another name _was_ the thing to do, Dayton. If I had hurled 'Roger
+Kenwick' into that group, I imagine that some one would have made
+connections and turned me over to the lunacy commission. My guardian
+angel was on the job when I decided to keep my identity a secret that
+night."
+
+Dayton surveyed him with obvious satisfaction. It was a good sign that
+Kenwick had thrown off some of his former apathy. And yet there still
+remained a cold indifference about him, a sort of contemptuous disregard
+of the crowded room, that for a man of Kenwick's caliber and social
+position seemed to him inexplicable. He had an uncomfortable conviction
+that this inscrutable self-possession would not take well with the
+jury; that it somehow gave credence to the theory of the prosecution
+that the prisoner was a hardened criminal. The local reporters were
+already busy with their pencils. And Dayton could visualize a paragraph
+in the evening sheet beginning, "Roger Kenwick himself showed a complete
+indifference to the proceedings which----"
+
+The conference with the judge had ended and he was rapping for order.
+The charge against the prisoner was read and the tedious task of
+impaneling the jury began. Dayton paid little attention to the formal
+process of getting the legal machinery into action, except to object in
+a decisive voice to three or four of the prospective jurymen. Aside from
+these interruptions, he continued to identify the various witnesses to
+his client, in an impersonal, entertaining manner, like the official
+guide on a personally conducted excursion.
+
+A short, ruddy man in long overcoat entered and cast impatient eyes
+about the room for a seat. One was immediately brought in for him from
+an adjoining room. "Annisen, ex-coroner," Dayton explained. "He's got a
+fine position now as health officer somewhere in Missouri. He hated like
+hell to come back and get mixed up in this fracas. You see, he never was
+a howling success out here; made the mistake of knocking the climate
+when he first came out, and no southern California town can stand for
+that. And then, he had too many irons in the fire all the time, and
+neglected his official position sometimes. I have a haunting suspicion
+myself that he didn't spend any too much of his valuable time over the
+examination of your supposed remains. We don't need to fear him; he'll
+be a reluctant witness."
+
+He swung about in his chair to announce himself satisfied with the
+twelve men who had been selected to try the case, and then engaged for a
+moment in conversation with the district attorney.
+
+Kenwick turned his gaze to the window where he could see the date-palms
+from a new angle, their curving leaves motionless now in the still
+wintry air. The swinging doors of the court-room fanned incessantly back
+and forth, but he no longer felt any interest in the hostile faces of
+the witnesses. His mind was wandering back along the sun-lighted path of
+his boyhood to the days when he had mother, father, and brother, and had
+never suspected that he would ever lose any of them. It was a good
+thing, though, he told himself bitterly, a good thing that they were
+gone; that the last of the Kenwicks should go down in disgrace without
+spreading the cankerous taint to anyone else of that proud name. The
+imminent exposé appeared to him all at once in the guise of a mighty
+tree, which was holding its place in the earth only by a single
+supporting root. Now that root was to be chopped away. The house of
+Kenwick was to fall. But in its fall it would harm no one else. For the
+tree had long stood alone, solitary and leafless amid the white wastes
+of life.
+
+He became aware at last that the buzzing noise of the court-room had
+increased. There seemed to be some new excitement in the air. He brought
+his eyes back from the courtyard and glanced inquiringly at Dayton. But
+he had leaned forward in response to a curt signal from the district
+attorney. Every one except the jurymen was talking in low tones with
+some one else. In their double row of seats the twelve newly-sworn
+judges sat solemnly silent, freighted with a sense of their
+responsibility.
+
+Whence the news came Kenwick never knew, for during the moments just
+preceding he had been deep in reverie and had lost connection with his
+surroundings. But whatever it was, it seemed all at once to be upon
+every one's tongue. Those who did not know were eagerly seeking
+information from their neighbors. Kenwick's eyes swept the room,
+puzzled. Dayton would doubtless tell him when he finished his
+conference. But before he had time to gain the knowledge from this
+source, it was hurled at the court-room from behind the lawyer's table.
+The district attorney evidently deemed this the only way to quiet the
+increasing tumult. He got to his feet, and flapping the fugitive
+eye-glasses between his fingers, faced the judge and made one brief
+statement, unembellished by explanation or judicial comment.
+
+"Your Honor, news has just been received from a reliable source that the
+house at Rest Hollow has burned to the ground!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+The case of the people of the State of California against Roger Kenwick
+opened with the testimony of Richard Glover, chief witness for the
+prosecution. Glover took the stand quietly and told his story in lucid,
+clear-cut sentences, pausing occasionally to recall some obscure detail
+or make certain of a date. The court reporter found it easy to take down
+his unhurried statements. From time to time the "freckled" eyes of the
+narrator rested upon the man in the prisoner's box with an impersonal,
+dispassionate glance. And always he met those of Kenwick fixed upon his
+face with a sort of awed fascination. Just so might the victim of a
+snake-charmer watch him while he disclosed the secret of his power.
+
+Richard Glover told how on the afternoon of February 10, 1918, he had
+been summoned to the home of Everett Kenwick in New York and entrusted
+with a commission. He was not known to the elder Kenwick, personally, he
+said, but had been a boyhood friend of Isabel Kenwick, his wife.
+Prompted by her recommendation, Mr. Kenwick had chosen him for the
+delicate family confidence which they imparted.
+
+It appeared that the younger brother and only living relative of Everett
+had enlisted in the service, and after several months of severe fighting
+at the front had been wounded. He had been sent to a convalescent home
+in England where his physical health had been almost completely
+restored. But the surgeons had discovered that the blow on his head had
+caused a pressure upon the brain, which they deemed incurable by means
+of surgery, and which they said would ultimately result in some form of
+mental aberration. So they had sent him back to New York, diagnosed as a
+permanent invalid, and had recommended that a close watch be kept upon
+him until such time as it might be necessary to commit him to an
+institution.
+
+During the first few weeks after his return it became apparent to the
+brother and sister-in-law that this diagnosis of the unfortunate young
+man's condition was correct. He was given isolated quarters upon the
+third floor of the house and unostentatiously watched. Letters which he
+wrote were intercepted and his friends notified that he had become
+irresponsible. Valuables and possessions which had been intimately
+associated with his past life were removed from his reach, since they
+appeared to confuse him and hasten his mental collapse. At the time when
+he, Glover, was summoned to the Kenwick home, prominent brain
+specialists had been consulted and had agreed that an operation would be
+extremely dangerous to the patient and might not succeed in restoring
+him to normality. And Mr. Kenwick, after what must have been weeks of
+painful pondering, had decided not to risk it but to follow the advice
+of the physicians and provide for his brother unremitting guardianship.
+Mrs. Kenwick had strongly favored a private sanitarium, but to this her
+husband would not consent. He was stricken with grief and was determined
+that Roger Kenwick's share of the family estate should be spent upon his
+comfort. And he refused to relinquish all hope of his brother's ultimate
+recovery. In spite of the consensus of professional opinion to the
+contrary, he still clung to the hope that the patient, aided by rest and
+youth, would recuperate. And he was a shrewd enough business man to
+realize that private sanitariums for the mentally disabled thrive in
+proportion to the number of incurables which they maintain. Complete
+recovery for his brother was the last thing that he might expect if he
+surrendered him to the mercies of such an asylum.
+
+And so he had commissioned the witness to rent for him the California
+home of Charles Raeburn, an old family friend, who had built it for his
+bride about twelve years before, but had closed it and returned East
+following her tragic suicide there a few months after their marriage.
+Raeburn had offered it to the Kenwicks with the stipulation that the
+apartments which had been his wife's boudoir and sitting-room should not
+be used. And Everett Kenwick accepted the suggestion, feeling that if he
+were in his brother's position he would wish to be as far away as
+possible from the surroundings in which he had grown up, and
+particularly from the curious eyes of former acquaintances. Glover had
+undertaken the errand and departed immediately for Mont-Mer to open the
+house and employ a suitable caretaker.
+
+"Just a moment, Mr. Glover." It was Dayton who interrupted him. "On the
+occasion of your call at the Kenwick home, did you see--the patient?"
+
+"I did not. They had particularly chosen a time for the interview when
+he was undergoing treatment at a physician's office."
+
+"Why did they object to your seeing him?"
+
+"I don't think they did object, but they felt that it would be unwise
+just at that time. The young man was obsessed with the idea that the
+house was full of strange people; that there was a constant stream of
+guests coming and going. There was no reason why I should see him, so
+they planned to avoid a meeting."
+
+"As a matter of fact did you ever see him while he was under your
+surveillance?"
+
+"No."
+
+"On what occasion did you first see him?"
+
+"On a street in San Francisco about two months ago."
+
+"On that occasion did he see you?"
+
+"I think not."
+
+"Proceed."
+
+The witness went on to relate how he had departed that same evening from
+New York, had opened up the house at Mont-Mer, and secured the services
+of a man whom he chanced to meet on the train and who was able to
+produce evidence that he had once been head physician at a Los Angeles
+sanitarium.
+
+Here Dayton cut in again. "What was the name of this man?"
+
+"Edward Marstan."
+
+"Proceed."
+
+Arrangements having been made with him, the witness communicated with
+Everett Kenwick, according to agreement, and the patient was sent West
+in care of an attendant, one Thomas Bailey, now deceased. Glover himself
+had been in Los Angeles at the time of their arrival, but had received
+word from Marstan that the patient was properly installed at the Raeburn
+residence, and the attendant returned to New York.
+
+Dayton's voice interposed once more. "Is the Charles Raeburn home known
+by any other name, Mr. Glover?"
+
+"Yes--by the name of Rest Hollow."
+
+"Proceed."
+
+"My own concern in the affair was simply that of business manager," the
+witness continued, "so I remained in Los Angeles for I could manage the
+financial end of it just as well from that short distance."
+
+The district attorney suddenly broke the thread of the story here. "Then
+you deliberately avoided an encounter with the patient?"
+
+"I did."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"The maladies which are classed as mental are particularly repugnant to
+me. I was under no obligation to see him, and I had a business of my
+own to which this was merely a side issue."
+
+"But it is true, is it not," Dayton cut in, "that you received a
+generous salary from Mr. Everett Kenwick for this--long distance
+supervision?"
+
+"I received from him an allowance to be spent upon the upkeep of the
+grounds, the comfort of the patient, the wages of an attendant, and so
+on. I sent him a monthly statement of the bills when I had received and
+checked them."
+
+"You say you had another business; what was it?"
+
+"Publicity writer for the Golden State Land Co. of Los Angeles."
+
+"They own large mineral spring holdings in our neighboring county on the
+south, do they not?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And how long had you been interested with them at the time of this
+interview at the Kenwick home?"
+
+"About six months, I think."
+
+"Did Mr. Kenwick know of this other business interest?"
+
+"Certainly. That is one thing that led to his choosing me as his agent.
+He knew that I was permanently located in southern California and that
+I had established myself with a reputable company. It was a guarantee of
+permanence--and character."
+
+"One moment longer, Mr. Glover, before you go on. Was the elder Mr.
+Kenwick aware of the fact that while you were in his employ you never
+visited Rest Hollow but once?"
+
+"I did visit Rest Hollow. I went there every month to see that the place
+was properly kept up and the attendant on duty. But I always went at
+night. I held my interviews with Dr. Marstan alone."
+
+"Go on."
+
+The narrative skipped now to the following November when the witness
+told of having received a communication from Dr. Marstan informing him
+that, owing to a mechanical accident, Roger Kenwick had recovered his
+sanity; that he, the physician, had carefully tested him and was fully
+convinced of this. It had been impossible just at that time for Glover
+himself to go to Mont-Mer as he was ill. And before he had had time to
+send more than a brief note in reply, the attendant wrote again saying
+that his former patient was bitterly opposed to having his brother know
+of his recovery, and had threatened him, the doctor, if he betrayed the
+news. Kenwick, he said, wished to use his present position to get more
+money out of his brother for some investment that he was then planning,
+for he knew that in case his recovery were known, it would be a long
+time before the court would grant him the control of his property, and
+his father's will had provided that he was not to inherit his half of
+the estate until he should have reached the age of twenty-five.
+
+The witness had not thought it expedient to notify Dr. Marstan of the
+elder Kenwick's death, so that he could not report this to the patient.
+They had evidently had hot words upon the subject of the disclosure of
+the patient's condition, Marstan being highly scrupulous and not being
+willing to retain his position as keeper when it was merely nominal, an
+arrangement upon which the young man himself insisted.
+
+In order to prevent the patient from carrying out some sinister threat,
+Marstan had locked his charge into the house and gone into town probably
+to consult a lawyer upon the proper course for him to pursue. This much
+he could surmise from a half-written letter which the witness himself
+had found on the evening that he returned to Mont-Mer.
+
+"And that was the state of things when you arrived at Rest Hollow on
+the evening of November 21?" Dayton asked.
+
+"That was the state of things."
+
+"Describe the condition of the house and grounds on the evening of the
+tragedy."
+
+The witness did so, with the same unhurried attention to detail.
+
+"And when you came upon the body of the dead man under the dining-room
+window, why did you conclude that it was your former charge, Roger
+Kenwick?"
+
+"Every circumstance seemed to point to it. And I found upon the body
+possessions that seemed unmistakable evidence."
+
+"Describe those possessions."
+
+"A wrist-watch with the initials R.K. upon the inside; a silver
+match-case with the one initial K.; a linen handkerchief with that
+initial."
+
+"But you said, did you not, in the early part of your testimony, that
+the patient's personal possessions had been taken from him when he
+became incompetent?"
+
+"They had. But all of his things were in Doctor Marstan's possession.
+They were in his apartments, and any normal person could easily have
+found them, and naturally Kenwick would have demanded them."
+
+"Had you ever seen a picture of Roger Kenwick to aid you in your
+identification of his body?"
+
+"No. But I knew his age, and it seemed to correspond exactly with that
+of the dead man. Furthermore he looked like a person who was wasted by
+ill health. I hadn't a doubt that it was he."
+
+"How did you think that he had met his death?"
+
+"By suicide. I believed then that the doctor had been mistaken and that
+he had not made a complete recovery."
+
+"When did you begin to suspect, Mr. Glover, that instead of being dead,
+the prisoner was a deliberate murderer?"
+
+"Not until I discovered that he had made his escape from Rest Hollow. I
+saw his name on a hotel register in San Francisco and I became alarmed
+and put a detective on his track, for I felt responsible for him and was
+not convinced that he should be at large. But the detective reported to
+me that Kenwick showed absolutely no signs of abnormality. Then I came
+down here and followed the back trail. And I discovered that Marstan had
+been killed in an automobile accident on the day when he had come into
+town for legal aid. By inquiring of the gardener at Rest Hollow I
+learned that he had seen a young man out under the dining-room window
+talking to Kenwick early in the afternoon. The prisoner was entreating
+this stranger to let him out and----"
+
+"Let that witness give his own testimony. That will do, Mr. Glover."
+Then, as he was about to leave the stand, "No, just a minute. You say it
+was about midnight when you discovered the body. Did you notify the
+coroner?"
+
+"That was my first impulse; but I found that the telephone was out of
+order, so I decided to wait until it was light before going in for him.
+But in the morning, just as I finished dressing, he came. He told me
+that he had been notified by some one else."
+
+"By whom?"
+
+"I don't know. He said that he was out of town when the message came in,
+and found it awaiting him when he returned. I got the impression that he
+didn't know himself who had reported the tragedy."
+
+This last testimony corresponded in every detail with that given by
+Annisen, who described minutely his findings upon the body, the
+discovery, a short distance away, of the loaded revolver with a shot
+fired out of it, and the haggard condition of the face, indicating long
+invalidism. The body, he said, had lain in the morgue until the
+following afternoon and been viewed by scores of the morbidly curious.
+Not one person had recognized it, nor apparently entertained the
+slightest suspicion that it was not the unfortunate inmate of Rest
+Hollow. And so he had felt justified in accepting Richard Glover's
+declaration of the dead man's identity. He knew that the patient's
+keeper had been killed in an automobile accident the day before, and
+every circumstance seemed to point to a suicidal frenzy.
+
+His story was followed by that of a gawky, frightened-looking boy who
+kept his eyes riveted upon the prosecution's chief witness while he
+talked. He disclaimed all knowledge of the arrangements concerning the
+patient's guardianship, his business being merely to care for the garden
+and furnace. He had never come into close contact with the patient
+himself; had only seen him at a distance sometimes, wandering about the
+grounds alone. He had always seemed perfectly quiet and harmless, but
+he, the gardener, had been afraid that he might some time have a "spell"
+such as he had heard of in similar cases, and so had kept carefully out
+of his way.
+
+In the late afternoon of November 21, he reported, when he returned from
+a far corner of the place where he had been pruning, he had found the
+patient lying in a faint on the floor of the garage. With some effort he
+had dragged him into the house and left him in the drawing-room, after
+bandaging his swollen leg as well as he could and forcing part of a
+glass of whisky down his throat. Then he had departed, after first
+making sure that the doors and windows on the ground floor were securely
+fastened. Late the following afternoon he had seen the prisoner standing
+at the dining-room window and had heard him call out in a threatening
+way to him. A moment afterward, without the slightest warning, the
+patient had doubled his fist and smashed the pane of glass to fragments.
+Convinced that this was one of the "spells" which he had dreaded, he had
+waited until he thought the patient was in bed and had then returned and
+boarded up the window.
+
+Here Dayton interrupted. "And you believed the man in the house to be
+ill and alone, and yet you felt no concern about his care?"
+
+"I didn't think he was alone. I had seen a woman around the place that
+afternoon, and I thought she was his nurse."
+
+A murmur swept around the breathless court-room. Everybody in the
+audience made some comment to his neighbor upon this new development.
+The judge rapped sharply for order. "Go on," commanded the district
+attorney.
+
+The witness proceeded to relate that he had gone to bed that night
+feeling nervous over the patient's conduct and had resolved to give up
+his employment at Rest Hollow. About eleven o'clock he had been roused
+from a fitful sleep by a knock at his door. Upon opening it he had found
+Gifford, the undertaker, standing on the threshold. Here he endeavored
+to recollect the exact words of the night caller, and after a moment's
+pause, produced the greeting: "Get up, boy. Do you know that there's
+been murder committed on this place to-night?" With Gifford he had
+hurried around to the dining-room side of the house and had discovered
+the dead body lying there under an oleander bush, near the very window
+which the patient had so unaccountably broken that same afternoon.
+Terrified, he had not paused to give the body even a fleeting glance,
+but had stumbled back to his room and made a hasty bundle of his
+clothes, determined not to pass another hour on that place. He
+remembered Gifford calling after him that he was not going to touch the
+body until the coroner had seen it. Ten minutes later he had fled,
+leaving his door unlocked behind him.
+
+He was dismissed from the stand, and after a moment of whispered parley,
+came the demand, "Call Arnold Rogers."
+
+A young man wearing heavy-rimmed glasses took the stand and told of his
+encounter with the prisoner on the evening of November 21. He described
+the scene at the gate in careful detail, halting frequently to correct
+himself. The district attorney interrupted him in mid-sentence.
+
+"Did it strike you at any time during the dialogue, Mr. Rogers, that the
+man inside the grounds might be--irrational?"
+
+"Yes, but that idea did not occur to me until the end of the interview.
+Being a complete stranger in the community, I knew nothing about him, of
+course, but his voice and method of appeal struck me as being a little
+abnormal, and when I was starting away and he stretched a letter through
+the gate and asked me to mail it for him I was convinced that he was not
+rational. I was formerly a director at one our State hospitals for the
+insane and I know that the mania of patients to write letters and ask
+visitors to mail them is one of the commonest symptoms of their
+affliction."
+
+"And so you paid no attention to that appeal?"
+
+"I was escorting a lady. I planned to take her home first and then
+return or send somebody. My car was disabled and I felt responsible for
+my companion."
+
+"Who was the lady?"
+
+"My sister, Mrs. Paddington. I was visiting at her home. And when we had
+gone on our way she told me, what I had already begun to suspect, that
+the inmate of Rest Hollow was a mental invalid; that he was well cared
+for, and although the case was pathetic, we need feel under no
+obligation to return. His attendant, we reasoned, had already discovered
+him by that time and taken him back to the house. We had both dismissed
+him from our minds when about half an hour later a woman rushed up to
+our door, breathless from a long trip by foot, and told us that the
+inmate of Rest Hollow had killed himself; that she had found him lying
+dead under the dining-room window. I don't remember just who 'phoned the
+news in to the proper authorities, but I think it was she. My sister
+offered to send her into town in one of her cars, and did so. We never
+knew her name nor saw her again."
+
+"And you credited the woman's story as it stood?"
+
+"We saw no reason to doubt it. It fitted exactly with our encounter at
+the gate. The time was a coincidence, too. We assumed that the young
+man's attendant had not arrived in time to save him from suicide. And
+there was another reason, too, why we did not care to give the matter
+more intensive investigation." He stopped and glanced appealingly at his
+questioner, but there was no relenting in the lawyer's eyes. "My sister
+had a guest visiting her to whom the name of Roger Kenwick
+brought--unhappy associations. She was unfortunately present at the
+arrival of the woman from Rest Hollow, and after the shock of the
+announcement was over we carefully avoided all further discussion of the
+tragedy. The following morning, in courtesy to our guest, I went over to
+the Raeburn house with some flowers from the Utopia gardens, and
+verified the report that the patient was dead. The next day my sister's
+friend left for her home in San Francisco and we considered the affair a
+closed incident."
+
+The testimony of the other witnesses for the prosecution was given in
+due order, and the case summed up against Roger Kenwick charged him
+with having laid a deliberate plot to murder Marstan, his former keeper,
+he being the only man, he thought, who could interfere with his
+financial plans, and prevent him from playing upon his brother's
+chivalric affection.
+
+It was pointed out that only a month before his recovery the Kenwick
+estate had trebled its value, owing to the fact that leather goods,
+which were the source of the Kenwick income, had trebled in value since
+the beginning of the war. From newspaper accounts and discussions with
+Marstan himself, the recovered patient had shrewdly sized up the
+situation and laid his plans. It was previously stated that the elder
+Kenwick had, before his brother's misfortune, kept a jealous grip upon
+the family purse, and that during his college days at the State
+University, Roger Kenwick had been obliged to eke out his allowance by
+doing newspaper work on one of the San Francisco dailies. Only in his
+softened mood was Everett Kenwick to be counted upon for continued
+generosity.
+
+On the day of the tragedy, the ward had watched Marstan closely and had
+seen him depart for town. Earlier in the afternoon he had himself shown
+signs of violence in order to sustain the impression that he was still
+irresponsible. Kenwick's plan to kill his warden was perfectly safe,
+for he knew that if the crime ever came to light he could be cleared on
+an insanity charge. His worse punishment would be commitment to an
+institution, from which he could later be released by proving himself
+cured.
+
+On the way out from town the doctor's car had pitched over a cliff,
+killing him instantly. Kenwick, ignorant of the tragedy and lying in
+wait for his victim, saw a man steal in late at night through the side
+entrance. No callers ever came to the place, so having no doubt that it
+was the returning warden, he had crept up behind him in the darkness and
+shot him in the head with the revolver which his attendant always kept
+loaded for an emergency, and which the patient by spying upon his warden
+one night, had discovered.
+
+A few minutes previous to the murder he had played a skilful part at the
+front gate, holding up the first person who passed and telling an
+incoherent story which he knew, coming from him, would not be believed,
+and which would be of valuable assistance in case it were ever necessary
+to prove an insanity charge.
+
+When he discovered that he had killed the wrong man, he adopted a plan
+which proved him not only rational but unusually astute. From a
+previous conversation with the dead man, whom he now recognized as a
+fellow who had once come in to assist with some work on the car, he knew
+him to be a stranger in the community. He knew himself to be equally
+unknown, except by name, and it was an easy matter to exchange
+identities. So Kenwick had transferred to the dead man certain of his
+own personal possessions which he discovered after his mental recovery.
+He had selected these carefully and with diabolical cunning, placed them
+in the other man's pockets, and then made his escape from the place
+either by foot or in the wagon of the undertaker, which must by this
+time have arrived.
+
+When he reached Mont-Mer, the testimony continued, he had given a
+fictitious name, gained the sympathy and credence of the doctor and
+undertaker, and finally, by a clever ruse, escaped from town as
+custodian of the body of the very man whom he had planned to kill.
+Knowing that Marstan was dead, he felt himself completely secure and
+foot-free to carry out his designs. The only person upon whom he did not
+reckon, because he didn't know of his existence, was Richard Glover.
+
+The one missing link in the story was supplied by evidence which,
+although circumstantial, seemed undeniably convincing to the jury. The
+woman who had notified the coroner must also have been an inmate of Rest
+Hollow, the mistress of Marstan, who had lived in ease and luxury,
+unknown to the physician's employer or any one else. She knew that her
+reputation lay in Kenwick's hands. She was tired of Marstan and was
+eager but afraid to escape. The criminal had supplied her with the means
+at small cost. The time of the disclosure of the crime had been
+skilfully worked out between them. And it had been executed with a
+masterly skill. Depot authorities had reported later that a woman
+traveling alone had bought a ticket on the late train for San Francisco
+that evening. The station-agent remembered the incident perfectly. By
+good luck Kenwick had caught the same train. They had traveled to the
+city together.
+
+Glover, who had been recalled to the stand and was giving this
+testimony, stated that upon dismissing the detective from his employ he
+had followed the case himself and was certain that Kenwick and his
+accomplice had lived together intermittently in San Francisco, and that
+he had been supplying her with funds.
+
+It was at this point that Roger Kenwick, who had been sitting like a man
+frozen to his chair, suddenly electrified the court-room by springing
+to his feet. He had forgotten his surroundings, was contemptuous of the
+formalities, oblivious to everything save the insolent assurance in
+Richard Glover's eyes, and the steady gaze with which Marcreta Morgan's
+brother was regarding him. His sensitive nostrils quivered like those of
+a highly strung race-horse. His hands, those hands so impatient of
+delay, were clenched till the knuckles showed through the drawn skin
+like knobs of ivory. He struggled to speak but no words came. Then he
+became aware of the fact that the sheriff was forcing him back into his
+seat. Dayton leaned over and whispered sharply to him. "Sit down, man.
+You'll kill your case. What do you want them to think of you?"
+
+The words recalled him to his surroundings. From sheer physical weakness
+he sank back into his chair. Another moment intervened while the
+auditors relaxed from the moment of tension. Then out of the deathly
+silence came Dayton's voice again, calm and with no trace of excitement.
+
+"You say that when you first discovered the prisoner in San Francisco
+you employed a detective to help you on his case, Mr. Glover. Look
+around the court-room. Is that man present?"
+
+"He is." There was a shade of reluctance in the reply.
+
+"What is his name?"
+
+"Granville Jarvis."
+
+The next moment Glover had stepped down from the stand and resumed his
+place at the far end of the long table. Dayton leaned across to his
+client. "Jarvis?" he inquired, his pencil poised above his pad.
+"Granville Jarvis; is that the name?"
+
+The light had gone out of Kenwick's eyes and the fire out of his voice.
+He had crumpled down in his chair like a man suddenly overcome with a
+spinal disease. He looked at Dayton with dead eyes.
+
+"The name," he said bitterly, "is Judas Iscariot!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+It was two o'clock before court, which had been dismissed for lunch
+after Richard Glover's testimony, convened again. During the noon hour a
+tray containing the only tempting food which the prisoner had seen since
+his incarceration was brought up to his cell. It had become apparent to
+the jailer that he had friends, and perhaps he was moved thereby to a
+tardy compassion. But Kenwick, despite Dayton's admonition to "Brace up
+and eat a good meal," waved it indifferently aside.
+
+"I'm done for," he said simply. "I don't see how any twelve men could
+hear the evidence that was presented this morning and find me innocent.
+And by the time Jarvis gets through telling anything he likes, and
+proving it----Well, it appears that every person who has been connected
+in any way with me since this trouble fell upon me has taken advantage
+of my misfortune to enrich himself. I don't care much now what they do
+with me. When you lose your faith in humanity it's time to die. I'm no
+religious fanatic, Dayton, but for these last two months I've thanked
+God on my knees every night of my life for having brought me back into
+the light. Now I wish that I had died instead."
+
+Dayton made no further effort to rouse him from his despair. For
+although not of a sensitive or particularly intuitive temperament
+himself, he had come to realize the utter impossibility of finding this
+other man in his trouble. "You don't seem to have much faith in me," was
+all he said as he made some notes on the back of an envelope. But he
+finally induced his client to eat some of the food upon his tray and
+after the first few mouthfuls Kenwick was surprised to find that he was
+ravenously hungry.
+
+"That's something like," the lawyer approved, as they made their way
+back through the court-house grounds. "Now you're good for another three
+hours."
+
+It hadn't seemed possible to Kenwick that he was, that his nerves could
+stand the strain of hours and hours more of this, and there was no
+assurance that the ordeal would end to-day or to-morrow. But Dayton's
+easy assurance gave him a new grip upon himself.
+
+They found the audience waiting and eager. None of them seemed to have
+moved since they had been dismissed for recess two hours before. Only
+the jury were absent, but five minutes after Kenwick's arrival they
+filed in and took their places. The district attorney appeared to have
+lost interest in the case. He sat staring out of the window with a sort
+of wistful impatience as though he were visualizing a potential game of
+golf. Dayton glanced at some notes on the table at his elbow and issued
+his first command. "Call Madeleine Marstan."
+
+In response to this summons one of the veiled women in the rear of the
+room rose and came forward. She was quietly dressed in a gown of
+clinging black silk and a black turban with a touch of amethyst. Every
+eye in the court-room was fixed upon her, but she took the oath with the
+unembarrassed self-possession of one long accustomed to the public gaze.
+Kenwick, turned toward her, detected a faint odor of heliotrope.
+
+"Where do you live, Mrs. Marstan?" Dayton inquired.
+
+She gave a street and number in San Francisco.
+
+"What is your occupation?"
+
+"I am an actress."
+
+"Do you know the prisoner?"
+
+Without glancing at him she replied, with her unruffled composure, "I
+do."
+
+"How long have you known him?"
+
+"About two months."
+
+"Describe the occasion on which he was first brought to your notice."
+
+She settled back slightly in her chair, like a traveler making herself
+comfortable for what promised to be a long journey. "It was on the
+afternoon of November 19 that my husband, a physician, came into our
+apartment in San Francisco and announced to me that he had just secured
+a remunerative position with a wealthy man down at Mont-Mer. He said
+that the work would begin immediately and we must be ready to leave the
+following day. I asked him for more details and he told me that the
+position was a secretaryship which would involve little labor and afford
+us a luxurious home with excellent salary. He had never been a success
+in his profession, owing chiefly to the fact that he was dissipated, and
+I had seriously considered leaving him and going back to the stage. But
+I had decided to give him another chance, and since he appeared to find
+my questions concerning this new work annoying, I agreed to go and allow
+him to explain more fully when we should arrive.
+
+"We went down in our own car and arrived at Rest Hollow in
+mid-afternoon. My husband showed me over the house and grounds and I
+thought I had never seen such a beautiful place. There was no one about
+when we came, and after he had given me every opportunity to be
+favorably impressed with the new home, we went to an upstairs
+sitting-room in the left wing, and he told me, while he smoked one of
+the expensive-looking cigars that he found there, further details
+concerning his employer. I learned that he was an invalid, a young man
+by the name of Roger Kenwick, who was recuperating from too strenuous
+service overseas. We discussed the matter for only a few minutes before
+my husband announced that it was time for him to go to the depot and
+meet his charge, who was being brought up from Los Angeles by the
+previous companion, who had taken him there to be outfitted with winter
+clothes.
+
+"This development in the case rather startled me, and as we walked along
+the upper hall and over into the right wing, which he said had been
+recently cleaned but was not to be used, I demanded more specific
+details concerning the arrangement. I wanted particularly to know why
+there was to be a change of 'secretaries' and whether the young man
+himself was willing to accept the companionship of people whom he had
+never seen.
+
+"My husband had been drinking. I think he must have found a well-stocked
+wine-closet at Rest Hollow. And he finally grew furious at my
+insistence. The more angry he became the more he betrayed to me the fact
+that there was something to conceal. He had never told me the name of
+the man who had offered him this position, but I knew that there must be
+an intermediary. While I continued to question him he opened the door of
+one of the rooms in the right wing, hoping, I suppose, to distract my
+attention. We went on with our discussion there. And at last I refused
+pointblank to have anything to do with the affair, and told him that I
+was going to leave him and go back to the profession that would afford
+me an honest living. This infuriated him. He lost all self-control and
+confessed then, what I had already begun to suspect, that young Kenwick
+was a mental patient and had been in no way consulted in the
+arrangement. This disclosure terrified me, for I knew that my husband
+was not a competent person for such a responsibility. Hot words followed
+between us, and ended in his knocking me senseless on the floor. When I
+recovered consciousness, perhaps an hour later, I found myself locked
+into the room with no possible means of escape. The blow had dislodged a
+vertebra and I was in horrible pain. For a long time I lay on the bed
+massaging the injured place and trying to get comfortable.
+
+"Early in the evening I heard some one being dragged into the house from
+the rear. I was unable to see anything, of course, but I could
+distinctly hear footsteps and the subsequent running around of an
+attendant. I concluded that my husband had returned drunk, and I was
+relieved to know that he had evidently not brought the patient with him.
+I knew that I had no recourse but to wait until the stupor had worn off
+and my husband came to release me. I spent a wakeful and wretched night.
+In the morning----"
+
+Here a vivid and convincing description of her first encounter with the
+patient ensued. She drew a clear-cut picture of her own horror in
+hearing footsteps outside her door and of having the name "Roger
+Kenwick" called in through the closed portal; of her terror at finding
+herself unaccountably alone with a man whom she believed to be a violent
+maniac.
+
+Here Dayton held up the narrative. "What evidence did he give to
+convince you of his insanity?'
+
+"None at first. He seemed to talk quite rationally, and fearing that I
+might make him angry if I kept silence, I made evasive answers to his
+questions. He prepared food and sent it up to me at what I know now must
+have been immense physical cost to himself. I had come to the conclusion
+that he, like myself, was the victim of some foul conspiracy and had
+decided to risk confiding in him when all at once his manner changed. He
+began to talk wildly of finding a loaded revolver and of shooting any
+one who came near the place. A few minutes later, for no apparent
+reason, I heard him smash a window in the room just under mine. My
+terror increased a hundredfold, for I know absolutely nothing about the
+proper care of the insane. Late that same night I heard him crawl out
+through the broken window, and he called up to me that he was either
+going to get help or commit suicide.
+
+"Almost insane myself now with terror, I waited until I heard his
+footsteps grow faint in the distance, then worked at the lock of my
+door, and at last succeeded in picking it with a pen-knife. Then I
+rushed downstairs, turned on the lights, and tried to make my escape. I
+had several of my own personal keys in my possession, and with one of
+these I opened the front door, which had been securely locked, I suppose
+by the gardener. My one frantic object was to get away and find my
+husband.
+
+"But just as I got the door open I heard a shot fired from the side of
+the house. I hurried around there, and when I reached the spot from
+which the sound had come, I found just what I feared--a man lying dead
+under the window. I thought, of course, that it was the patient who had
+killed himself in a mania, as he had threatened to do. Filled with
+horror at the idea of leaving him there alone and uncovered in the
+storm, I ran back to the living-room, picked up the first thing at hand
+(an Indian blanket), and threw it over him. Then I hurried to the
+nearest house, about a mile away, and gave the alarm.
+
+"Believing that it was my husband's neglect that had caused the tragedy,
+my purpose was to find him and get his version of the story before I
+betrayed him. So I furnished no further information to the authorities
+in town save that Roger Kenwick, the inmate of Rest Hollow, had
+committed suicide. I really knew nothing else about it but that bare
+fact.
+
+"But that night I discovered, when I reached Mont-Mer, that my husband
+had been killed in an auto accident while coming out from the depot. I
+went to the morgue and identified his body, ordered the remains to be
+shipped north for interment, and left, unknown to any one, on the late
+northbound train. The undertaker told me that there had been no other
+victim of the tragedy, so I reasoned that the story which Mr. Kenwick
+had told me about a sprained leg was true, after all, that he had been
+injured in the catastrophe and had, by a curious freak of chance, found
+his way back alone to the very place that was awaiting him and in which
+he had been living for the preceding ten months."
+
+Dayton declared himself satisfied with the testimony and turned the
+witness over to the prosecution. The district attorney had recovered his
+interest. "Mrs. Marstan," he said, groping for his glasses, "can you
+produce a certificate of marriage to Dr. Marstan?"
+
+"I cannot. Important papers, including that, were among the few things
+that I took to Rest Hollow in November, and you have been informed that
+the place is completely destroyed."
+
+"That will do."
+
+She stepped down from the stand, and for the first time her eyes rested
+upon the prisoner. In them was an expression that would have given him
+new courage had he seen it, but Roger Kenwick sat motionless as a
+statue, his gaze fixed immutably upon the floor. It was only when the
+name of the next witness was called that he came back to a sense of his
+surroundings. "Call Granville Jarvis."
+
+Dayton surveyed the Southerner sharply before he put his first question.
+"You are the detective whom Richard Glover employed in San Francisco to
+shadow the prisoner?"
+
+"I am."
+
+"How long were you in Mr. Glover's employ?"
+
+"About two weeks."
+
+"Two _weeks_? Why did you give up the case then?"
+
+"Because at the end of that time I was convinced that Roger Kenwick was
+neither mentally unbalanced nor guilty of any crime. I communicated this
+opinion to Mr. Glover and resigned from further service."
+
+"But you still continued to shadow the prisoner?"
+
+"I still continued to cultivate his acquaintance. I considered him one
+of the most interesting men I had ever met."
+
+"And your connections with him since then have been of a purely
+friendly character? Not in any way professional, Mr. Jarvis?"
+
+"No, I can't say that. For a few weeks after I had resigned from Mr.
+Glover's service I was asked to take up the case again from a different
+angle; employed, I may say, by some one else."
+
+"By whom?"
+
+For just an instant the witness hesitated. Then, "By Mr. Clinton
+Morgan."
+
+"Describe that incident, please."
+
+Jarvis clasped his hands behind his head and stared off into space. "It
+was near the end of December that Professor Morgan came to my rooms one
+evening and asked my assistance on the case of Richard Glover."
+
+For the first time since the beginning of the trial, the chief witness
+for the prosecution betrayed an unguarded emotion. The narrow slit of
+amber, showing between his drooping lids, widened.
+
+"My caller," Jarvis went on, "explained to me that he and his sister,
+who were friends of Roger Kenwick, had stumbled upon a clue the previous
+day that had made them suspect that there was foul play about his death;
+that perhaps he might even be alive after all, and a base advantage
+taken of his helplessness."
+
+Here Dayton interjected a question. "Was there any special reason why
+Professor Morgan should have chanced upon you as the detective for this
+investigation? Had you had any previous connection with him?"
+
+"Only an academic connection. He knew, through university affiliations,
+that I was out here on the coast doing some research work for Columbia
+in my chosen profession--criminal psychology."
+
+"Then you are not a detective?"
+
+"Not in the strict sense of the word. The finding out of a criminal is
+only the introductory part of my interest."
+
+"Proceed with your story, Mr. Jarvis."
+
+"Well, Professor Morgan and I had lunched together several times over at
+the Faculty Club on the campus, so I was not greatly surprised to
+receive a call from him. Furthermore, having heard the other side of
+this case, I was much interested in the opportunity to study it from a
+new angle. For while I was in Mr. Glover's employ, I had, unsuspected by
+Kenwick himself, subjected him to a variety of exacting psychological
+tests. Under the pretext of making some photographic experiments in
+which I was at that time interested, I had enlisted his aid on several
+occasions and in this way had made a rather thorough examination of his
+five senses, his power of association, his memory (both for
+retentiveness and recall), and had tried him out, by means of various
+athletic games, for muscular coördination, endurance, poise, and many
+other essentials of normality. In only one of these did I find him
+defective. And that one was memory.
+
+"My research was made the more interesting by the fact that shortly
+after I undertook the work for Mr. Glover the subject gave me,
+voluntarily and quite unsuspectingly, the complete story of his strange
+adventure at Rest Hollow, an adventure for which he frankly confessed
+that he could not account. It coincided exactly with the hypothesis
+which I had established for him; that he had at one period of his life
+been mentally unbalanced, and that he had in some way re-gained his
+sanity but not completely his memory. When I knew that there was likely
+to be a crime attributed to him (for Mr. Glover had hinted as much) my
+interest doubled. For Mr. Kenwick had on various occasions shown himself
+possessed of the highest ideals and a fineness of caliber which I have
+not often encountered. And so, in the employ of Professor Morgan, I
+shifted the focal point and turned the search-light of science upon the
+accuser. It has resulted in the most startling revelations."
+
+There was an inarticulate stir in the crowded room. From the rear seats
+men and women strained forward to catch every word as it fell, clear-cut
+and decisive, from the scientist's lips. Jarvis sat with one hand thrust
+into his pocket, and his keen eyes fixed upon the group of lawyers
+below. A casual observer of the scene might easily have mistaken his
+position and assigned to him the role of prosecuting attorney.
+
+"There was an insurmountable barrier, of course," he continued, "to my
+making any personal examination of Mr. Glover, as I had done with the
+former subject. One man was innocent and unsuspecting; the other, I felt
+certain, would be on his guard. And he was. Since I left his service,
+Richard Glover has avoided me. So a more indirect means of accomplishing
+my task had to be devised. After some consideration I decided to enlist
+the aid of an ally whom I knew to be both clever and discreet."
+
+A long-drawn sigh swept the court-room. It was that sigh, a mixture of
+eagerness and satisfaction by means of which an audience at a theater
+indicates to the actors that the performance is living up to its
+advertisements.
+
+"Mr. Kenwick himself," the witness went on in his calm, even voice, "had
+called my attention to a certain Madame Rosalie, a spiritualistic
+medium, who was taking the city by storm. He had interviewed her for his
+paper, and from his description I imagined that she might be able and
+willing to assist me. So I went to see her, and at the first mention of
+Mr. Kenwick's name she became intensely interested."
+
+Here Dayton's voice, sounding a curious little note of exultation, broke
+in again. "You have referred to this medium as 'Madame Rosalie.' Was
+that her professional or her real name?"
+
+"Her professional name. Her real name, as she disclosed it to me on the
+occasion of my first call, was Madeleine Marstan."
+
+Another moment of silence and then the witness proceeded. "Having told
+me her real name, she went on to describe her unexpected encounter, a
+few days previously, with Roger Kenwick, who she had thought was dead.
+It seemed that when Kenwick had come to her for a sitting, his name had
+been accidentally revealed to her by another client, and it had struck
+her with the force of a blow. For it recalled to her mind a horrible
+adventure at Mont-Mer, which she narrated for me then in detail. At
+first she had surmised that this must be some relative of the
+unfortunate young man, and she had done all she could, she said, to
+start him upon the track of the tragedy. When she discovered that it was
+the man himself, she was glad to place all her powers at my disposal.
+For she had returned to the city in November with two dominating
+purposes; first to find some employment which would bring in quick money
+and so pay her husband's debts and clear his name, and second to
+discover, if possible, the identity of the man who had led them both
+into the miserable Mont-Mer trap, which resulted so disastrously for
+every one concerned in it. She had not been able to make a stage
+contract, she said, for the season was too far advanced, and so she had
+turned to the occult, in which she had always felt a deep interest, and
+for which she knew herself to have an unaccountable talent. Fortunately
+her strange psychic ability had caught the attention of one of the
+university faculty and she had been given just the publicity which she
+needed.
+
+"And so we deliberately plotted between us the scientific testing of
+Richard Glover. I prepared a list of apparently random words in which
+were mingled what I call 'dangerous terms'; that is, words which were
+connected with the adventure at Rest Hollow. When these and the other
+tests were ready, I induced Glover, by means of a casual suggestion from
+a mutual acquaintance, to seek the aid of 'Madame Rosalie.' I felt
+certain that if he were not intimately connected with the tragedy he
+would scorn this idea, and that if he were, it was exactly the time that
+he would turn to the supernatural for aid. And I was not mistaken. For
+almost immediately he called upon the clairvoyant. And his response to
+the tests for association was amazing even to me. If I may quote from
+the list of words----" He drew a folded paper from his pocket. "Among
+many perfectly irrelevant terms I had smuggled in such words as
+'blanket' and 'window' and 'oleander.' Madame Rosalie reported that his
+gaze always returned to such suggestive words (despite her admonition to
+look at something else) before she could change the card. The
+subconscious response to evil association was almost perfect. There were
+many other tests, of course, and by the time he had completed them he
+had shown an intimate knowledge of the crime at Rest Hollow and an
+uneasiness from which any skilful psychologist could take his
+starting-point. And then, as a culminating incident, he supplied to the
+medium, quite of his own accord, the name 'Rest Hollow,' and put to her
+the unexpected question, 'Where is Ralph Regan?'
+
+"Having been thus convinced that he was the man we sought, Mrs. Marstan
+and I continued our investigations together. She went out with him, upon
+several occasions, and once, by pre-arrangement, accompanied him to the
+theater. On the same evening I invited Kenwick, and, all at once, called
+his attention to Glover. The response was like match to powder. The
+visual image of his former warden restored, in large degree, his memory.
+He was eager to reëstablish the connection. Mrs. Marstan had been
+careful to point out Kenwick to her escort, and the result was just what
+we had foreseen. It was he who evaded the encounter, supplying a pretext
+upon which he and Mrs. Marstan immediately left the theater.
+
+"But Glover now suspected that he was entrapped. He had already, I knew,
+put another detective upon Kenwick's track. When news was published of
+Mrs. Fanwell's arrival in Mont-Mer, and the subsequent demand to have
+the disappearance of her brother investigated, he decided that his only
+course was to act at once. Mrs. Marstan, aided by her unmistakable
+psychic ability, had advised him to follow his third plan, and this
+plan was to have Kenwick convicted of murder."
+
+"And this was the report that you turned over to Professor Morgan at the
+end of your investigation?" Dayton inquired.
+
+"This was the report. I was working on it with him up in San Francisco
+until late last night. We almost missed the train trying to fit together
+the final details. But I think the story, as I have given it to you, is
+now complete."
+
+"Now, one other thing, Mr. Jarvis. In the first part of your testimony
+you said that Mr. Morgan told you that he had stumbled upon a clue that
+had made him suspicious of Glover. Did he disclose to you the nature of
+that clue?"
+
+"Not at first. I told him that I preferred to work upon some theories of
+my own, unprejudiced by any evidence that he might have to offer."
+
+"And how many times have you seen Mr. Morgan since then?"
+
+"Only once. We came down from San Francisco together last night."
+
+"Then you made no reports to him before?"
+
+For the first time, the witness hesitated. Then his reply came with the
+customary clearness. "Not to him. I have reported to Miss Morgan on
+several occasions."
+
+"Then you have been really working with her upon this case?"
+
+"Yes, almost entirely with her."
+
+There was a very obvious reluctance in his voice now, but Dayton went on
+imperturbably. "When you came down from San Francisco last night, Mr.
+Jarvis, was Professor Morgan's sister in your party?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Dayton swept a glance over the rows of faces before him. "Is Miss Morgan
+in the court-room now?"
+
+"She has just come in." The promptness with which the witness had given
+his earlier testimony served to make his present reluctance the more
+apparent.
+
+Dayton brought his eyes back to the witness-stand. "That will do."
+
+Jarvis stepped down. The voice of the auditors, beginning in a subdued
+murmur, rose in marked crescendo. No word in it could be distinguished
+from another. Yet upon Roger Kenwick's sensitive nerves this message
+from the outer world registered. It was unmistakably applause.
+
+For the first time since the trial began, he felt his mask of graven
+indifference slipping from him. He was trembling in every fiber, and
+with one unsteady hand he made a pathetic effort to quiet the other. And
+then there fell upon his ears like the crash of thunder Dayton's curt
+command, "Call Miss Morgan."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+As the men standing in the far aisle made way for the new witness,
+Kenwick sat with averted eyes. Through the open window he stared out at
+the court-house palms which grew to gigantic size and then diminished
+under his blistering gaze. It was a monstrous thing, he told himself,
+for Clinton Morgan to allow this; to permit his sister to subject
+herself to such a strain. What could he be thinking about? But
+underneath his miserable apprehension for her there was something else;
+something else that sent the fiery blood rioting through his veins. For
+she must have been willing. Over and over he repeated to himself this
+assurance. She must have been willing to come to his defense, for had
+she not been, they could have found a way to avoid it.
+
+Marcreta Morgan, in long fur-trimmed motor-coat and dark veil, took the
+place which Granville Jarvis had vacated. She had none of Madeleine
+Marstan's calm self-assurance, but although she gave her testimony in a
+low voice, it was distinctly audible throughout the court-room. She sat
+with one gloved hand clasping the arm of the chair and her eyes resting
+upon Dayton. Only once, at the very end of the examination, did she
+raise them to meet the argus-eyed spectators. Dayton put his questions
+in an easy conversational tone as though he and the witness were alone
+in the room.
+
+"Miss Morgan, how long have you known the prisoner?"
+
+"About two years."
+
+"Describe the occasion of your first meeting."
+
+She did so in words that sounded carefully rehearsed.
+
+"And after he left San Francisco to go East and visit his brother did
+you ever hear from him?"
+
+"Yes. He wrote frequently, telling me about his brother's recovery from
+illness and other affairs, and then later that he had decided to enlist
+in the army."
+
+"At that time, Miss Morgan, had you ever known the State's witness here,
+Richard Glover?"
+
+"It was about that time that I first met him."
+
+"Describe your first encounter with him."
+
+Again the carefully prepared report. But she was gaining in
+self-possession now, and the veil seemed to annoy her. With steady
+fingers she reached up and removed it. Clinton Morgan, watching her
+from the front row of seats, with a hawklike vigilance, was suddenly
+reminded of that Sunday night in the old library when she had first
+broken her long silence concerning Roger Kenwick, and had seemed all at
+once to come into a belated heritage.
+
+The jurymen were leaning slightly forward in their seats, their eyes
+fixed upon the regal, fur-coated figure with delicately flushed profile
+showing clear-cut as a cameo against the frosted window-pane. Dayton
+thought that he caught an elusive fragrance that reminded him of
+something growing in his mother's garden.
+
+"And how many times," he proceeded, "how many times have you seen
+Richard Glover during the past year?"
+
+"I can't say exactly. For several months after our first meeting I
+didn't see him at all. But during the last three months his calls have
+been more and more frequent."
+
+"Has your brother known of these visits?"
+
+"My brother was in government service in Washington until about two
+months ago. He didn't know of them until he returned."
+
+"And has he approved of them?"
+
+"No, I can't say that he has."
+
+"Did he ever give any reason for his opposition?"
+
+"He told me that he suspected Mr. Glover of being an adventurer who was
+in need of----"
+
+Here the district attorney interrupted. "We object. The suspicions of
+another person are irrelevant, incompetent, and have nothing to do with
+the case."
+
+"Sustained," the judge decreed. "Stick to the facts, Mr. Dayton."
+
+"During those three months, Miss Morgan, has Richard Glover made an
+effort to induce you to marry him?"
+
+Her reply was given in a very low voice, but Dayton was sure that the
+jury caught it and he did not ask her to repeat. It was evident that the
+audience heard it, too, for another murmur rose and trailed off into
+silence before the lawyer went on. "Is it true that _you_ were the one
+who discovered the clue which led you and your brother to seek the
+services of Mr. Jarvis on this case?"
+
+She acknowledged it with a single word.
+
+"And what was that clue?"
+
+The gloved fingers closed a little closer over the arm of the chair. And
+then followed a story which caused Roger Kenwick to tear his gaze away
+from the fantastic palm-trees and fix it upon Richard Glover's face.
+There was no resentment in his eyes, but only the dawning of a great
+light. Granville Jarvis, watching him as a physician might watch beside
+the bedside of an unconscious patient, knew by the leaping flame in
+those somber eyes that the last lap of the long journey had been
+covered, and that Roger Kenwick's memory had come home to him. But if
+that knowledge brought him a scientist's satisfaction, he gave no sign
+of it. After that one intent moment, his eyes returned to the
+witness-stand and fixed themselves upon Marcreta Morgan's face. Dayton
+was proceeding relentlessly.
+
+"If you knew from the first that Richard Glover had stolen this story
+which he read to you as his own, why didn't you relate the circumstance
+to Mr. Kenwick when you saw him on the night that he was arrested for
+murder?"
+
+The reply came haltingly, as though the witness were feeling her way
+over uneven ground. "My brother and I had consulted Mr. Jarvis about
+that and he had advised against it. He didn't wish to arouse any
+suspicions in--in the prisoner's mind just then. And--well, you see, Mr.
+Kenwick and I had not seen each other since his--illness and during
+that first meeting we both avoided everything connected with--with the
+tragedy as much as possible. Of course if we had known that this charge
+of--of crime was to be preferred against him, I suppose we would have
+acted differently."
+
+This was no carefully rehearsed response, but nothing that she could
+have said would have disclosed more clearly the inside workings of the
+opposition's conspiracy. The web that had been woven around the prisoner
+had enmeshed with him every one who had ever been intimately associated
+with his past.
+
+And now that romance had entered upon the sordid scene the whole aspect
+of the case was changed. The air became charged all at once with an
+electric current of sympathy. To every man and woman in the room Richard
+Glover now appeared in the guise of a baffled adventurer, and Roger
+Kenwick as a man who had loved, and because of cruel circumstance had
+lost. But had he really lost? The crux of public interest shifted with
+the abruptness of a weathercock, from mystery to romance.
+
+"You assert, Miss Morgan, that you knew this story, 'A Brother of
+Bluebeard,' to be the one which the prisoner had read to you before he
+left for the East almost two years ago. What proof could you furnish of
+this?"
+
+"At the time that Mr. Glover read the story to me I had in my possession
+the sequel to it, which Mr. Kenwick had sent me in manuscript for my
+criticism, just before he left for training-camp. It used many of the
+same characters and was rooted in the same plot."
+
+"Could you produce that manuscript?"
+
+"Mr. Jarvis can produce it. I turned it over to him."
+
+The former witness leaned forward and laid a heap of pencil-written
+manuscript upon the table. But Dayton scarcely glanced at it. With one
+hand he pushed it aside, and then shifted the current of his interest
+into another channel. "When, and by what means, Miss Morgan, did you
+discover that Roger Kenwick had returned from France mentally disabled?"
+
+Her reply to this question came in a voice that was struggling against
+heavy odds for composure. "It was exactly one year ago to-day that I
+received that news. Several letters of mine to--the prisoner were
+returned to me unopened. And with them came a communication from Mr.
+Everett Kenwick telling me that--that it had become necessary for them
+to send his brother to a private asylum."
+
+"Did you know where that asylum was?"
+
+"Not then. He told me that he was debating over several different places
+but that he had almost decided upon a friend's home in southern
+California. He didn't tell me where this home was. I think he realized
+that--that I would rather not know."
+
+"And when did you discover that that place was Mont-Mer?"
+
+"On the night that Mr. Kenwick was reported dead."
+
+A murmur that was distinctly a wave of sympathy filled the chamber. But
+eagerness to catch the next question quieted it.
+
+"After that first letter telling you about the prisoner's misfortune,
+did you ever hear from Mr. Everett Kenwick again?"
+
+"Only once. Just a week before he died, he wrote again. He had just lost
+his wife and he seemed to have a premonition that he was not going to
+live very long."
+
+She was feeling for her handkerchief in the pocket of the fur-trimmed
+coat. Some of the men in the court-room averted their eyes. The face of
+more than one woman softened. Clinton Morgan sat regarding his sister
+with a curious composure. In his eyes was that mixture of compassion and
+awe that he had worn on the night when the gold and ivory book had
+betrayed to him her secret.
+
+"Yes?" Dayton went on gently, but with the same relentless persistence.
+"He wrote to you again? And what did he say?"
+
+"He said that he wanted me to have something that had belonged--to his
+brother. He told me that he felt that Roger Kenwick would have wished me
+to have it. And with the letter there came a box in which I found----"
+
+She had finished her search in the pocket of the motor-coat, and now she
+held something between her gloved fingers. "Mr. Everett Kenwick himself
+had only received it a short time before. There had been some delay and
+confusion about it, owing I suppose to his brother having been sent
+home--in just the way that he was. He himself never knew that he had won
+it. But it was such a wonderful display of courage----And the French
+officer whose life he had saved sent a letter, too, saying that France
+was grateful and wanted to express her appreciation in some way so----"
+
+And then she held it up before them; before the lawyers and the jury
+and the crowd of spectators--a bit of metal on its patch of ribbon.
+Holding it out before them, she sat there like a sovereign waiting to
+confer a peerage. And not the judge's gavel nor the commanding voice of
+the district attorney could still the tumult that rose and swelled into
+tumultuous applause.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the day following the notorious Kenwick murder trial, the Mont-Mer
+papers carried little other news. A special representative from the "San
+Francisco Clarion" and several Los Angeles journalists fed their copy
+over the wires and had extras out in both cities by eight o'clock.
+
+"Kenwick Acquitted" was the head-line which his own paper ran, with his
+picture and one of Richard Glover sharing prominence upon the front
+page. And because of Kenwick's previous connection with this daily and
+the fact that the two star witnesses for the defense were well known in
+the Bay region, the "Clarion's" story was the most comprehensive and
+colorful.
+
+It opened with a report of Dayton's speech which, it appeared, had
+electrified every one in the court-room, including the prisoner himself.
+But it had been unnecessary for the attorney to make a plea for his
+client, after the quietly dramatic testimony of the last witness for
+the defense. In thrilling terms the "Clarion" described Kenwick's final
+service at the front, when he had made his way alone across
+No-Man's-Land and saved for France one of her most gallant officers, and
+had given in exchange that thing which is more precious than life
+itself. Only through an accident, which had killed the man who had meant
+to batten upon his misery, had he been released from a pitiable bondage.
+
+Having thus sketched in his "human interest," the reporter proceeded to
+tell the story which had proved so overwhelmingly convincing to the jury
+and audience. How, in his skilfully planned narrative, Richard Glover
+had transposed the identities of the two dead men. How, upon receiving
+his commission from Everett Kenwick, he had first turned over his charge
+to Ralph Regan, admitted by his own sister to be an addict to drugs and
+a ne'er-do-well whom she was helping, in a surreptitious way, to
+support. How the accounts, forwarded from the Kenwick lawyer in New
+York, showed that Regan must have received out of the arrangement only
+his living and enough of the drug to keep him satisfied but not wholly
+irresponsible. How, upon his own infrequent visits to the patient (whom
+he himself had conducted across the continent instead of the mythical
+Bailey) Glover had foreseen two months before the tragedy that Regan
+could no longer be relied upon and had told him that he was about to be
+dismissed.
+
+How he had then secured the services of one Edward Marstan, whom he
+believed to be without family, and who represented himself as a
+physician in good standing but heavily in debt. How the arrangement had
+been made that he assume charge of the patient at the Mont-Mer depot,
+whither Kenwick was to be brought up from a day's sojourn in Los Angeles
+by Regan. How the physician, accompanied by his wife, had arrived from
+San Francisco that very day; how Marstan had quarreled with his wife,
+and leaving her unconscious in a room at Rest Hollow, had gone into town
+to get his charge. How, on the way out from town he had been killed in
+an accident while driving his own car, and how, by a curious fate,
+Kenwick had been restored to sanity and had found his way back alone to
+his former asylum.
+
+The story then went on to relate how Ralph Regan, evidently desperate
+over his loss of a home and drug supplies, had returned to Rest Hollow
+by stealth the following night, either to make a plea to the new
+caretaker or to search for drugs, and of how, finding the house dark and
+apparently deserted, he had forsaken all hope of reinstatement and had
+ended his life with the revolver which he had brought either for murder
+of Marstan or for suicide. The shot which he fired, the paper stated,
+had evidently been used to test his own nerve or the cartridges; and it
+had done its work. Letters written to his sister a few weeks before the
+tragedy, and produced by her in court, indicated a depression amounting
+to acute melancholia.
+
+Recalled to the witness-stand and subjected to crucial
+cross-examination, the gardener at Rest Hollow had broken down in his
+testimony, admitted that he was afraid of Glover, and that although he
+had been in too dazed a condition on the fatal night to examine the body
+of the dead man, he knew Ralph Regan to have been the former attendant
+and had frequently talked to him about the patient's symptoms, about
+which Regan appeared to know little and care less.
+
+The narrative then went on to tell how Richard Glover had discovered
+among the possessions of his charge certain manuscripts which he deemed
+suitable for publication, and how he had, after the death of the elder
+Kenwick, sold one of them under the name of Ralph Regan, choosing a
+real rather than a fictitious name in order that he might shift the
+theft to helpless shoulders if it were ever discovered. How he had, with
+the Kenwick capital entrusted to him, invested in large realty holdings
+which had completely absorbed his attention. How he had padded his
+accounts in order to wring extra money from Everett Kenwick under the
+guise of "special treatments" for the patient and so on. How on the
+night of the fatality he had driven to Rest Hollow from Los Angeles to
+give some final instructions to the new employee, and how, stumbling
+upon the dead body of Regan, he had been shocked to find himself
+involved in a tragedy. How he had then cold-bloodedly decided to have
+the body identified as Kenwick, partly to save himself from the charge
+of criminal neglect and partly because he knew that Everett Kenwick had
+left in his will a bequest that was to come to him "for faithful
+service" upon the death or recovery of his brother. How, not dreaming
+that his charge would ever recover, he had thus used his death as a
+means of gaining extra funds which he badly needed just at that time.
+
+How he had accordingly selected certain of the patient's personal
+possessions with which he had been entrusted, to deceive the coroner.
+How all the subsequent action had seemed to play into his hands: the
+coroner's easy acquiescence in the suicide theory and the identity of
+the body; the chance discovery, through Arnold Rogers, that the story of
+Kenwick's self-destruction had already been accepted by the community.
+
+How, preceding the coroner's inquest, Glover had spent the morning
+tracing the antecedent action of the tragedy and had heard of the
+accident which had killed Marstan. How he had erred in suspecting that
+the real victim of the tragedy was Kenwick and that the attendant had
+had the body identified as his own and then made his escape, fearing to
+communicate the news of the disaster to his employer. How he, Glover,
+had been startled to discover later that Kenwick was not only alive but
+had apparently recovered his mental health.
+
+The remainder of the story was given as the testimony of Madeleine
+Marstan, well-known favorite in the former Alcazar stock company, and
+Granville Jarvis, expert psychologist, whose skilful work was a strong
+plea for the admission of that newest of the sciences into court-room
+procedure.
+
+During this latter testimony, the "Clarion" asserted, interest had been
+divided between the ultimate fate of the accused and the valuable
+contributions which the laboratory experiments of the witness had given
+the case. The word-tests which he had provided to the medium were, he
+had explained, one of the surest means of discovering the train of
+associations which lodge in the guilty mind. He had never been convinced
+that Glover himself had committed a murder, but suspected that his crime
+lay in trying to fasten it upon a man whom he knew to be both innocent
+and helpless. The cards, containing a mixture of irrelevant and relevant
+words, had been shown him and then he had been instructed to turn his
+head in the opposite direction. These instructions he had carefully
+observed except in the cases of terms which held evil associations. In
+such cases his eyes almost invariably turned back to the card with the
+printed word. Such terms as "gravel" and "oleander" had produced this
+attraction. But they had also aroused his suspicions. And from the day
+of his first call upon "Madame Rosalie" the situation between them had
+been a succession of clever manoeuvers. Neither one of them had dared
+to let the other go. But in this encounter Mrs. Marstan had had the
+advantage. What he was able to find out about her was little compared
+with what she had discovered concerning him.
+
+That she possessed unmistakable psychic powers could not be disputed. By
+a means of communication, which she could not herself explain, she had
+received at the time of Roger Kenwick's interview with her a message
+from the spirit of Isabel Kenwick, confessing that it was she who had
+unwittingly brought Richard Glover into his life, and entreating his
+forgiveness.
+
+As to the concluding story of the actress, it was concerned with her
+description of how she had identified the body of her husband at the
+morgue on the evening of her flight from Rest Hollow; of how she had
+turned all arrangements for its shipment and burial over to the Mont-Mer
+and San Francisco undertakers, desiring to figure as little as possible
+in connection with the death of the man who had ruined her life. Of how
+she had succeeded in paying the debts against his name and had recently
+signed a stage contract with an eastern theatrical company.
+
+When the trial was ended the crowd that jammed the room rose and surged
+toward the man in the prisoner's box, like a human tidal wave. "Keep
+them back, Dayton," Kenwick implored. "I don't want to talk to them."
+
+Somehow his attorney managed to check the onrush, and the throng of
+congratulatory spectators was headed toward the exits. The room was
+almost empty when some one touched the prisoner's arm.
+
+"Can you give me a few words?" It was one of the local reporters.
+"You're a newspaper man yourself, Mr. Kenwick, and you know how it is
+about these things."
+
+Kenwick shook him off. "Come around later, to the hotel, if you like,"
+he said, and turned to take a hand that was timidly held out to him.
+
+"I didn't know whether you'd be willing to speak to me or not, Mr.
+Kenwick. But I just wanted to tell you that I'm satisfied, more than
+satisfied with--the way it has all come out."
+
+"I am glad to hear that, Mrs. Fanwell," Kenwick told her gravely. "I
+would never have been quite satisfied myself unless I had heard you say
+that. I wish you would leave your address with Dayton, for, you see, I
+feel a little bit responsible for you, and I would like to put you in
+the way of getting a new hold on life."
+
+The only other person in the room with whom he stopped to talk was
+Madeleine Marstan, who stood in conversation with Dayton near the door.
+To her his words of thanks were the more eloquent perhaps because they
+came haltingly, impeded by an emotion which he could not master.
+
+"It was nothing," she told him. "Nothing that I didn't owe you, Mr.
+Kenwick."
+
+"I don't see that you owed me anything," he objected. "As the affair has
+developed, we were both the victims of an ugly plot. It certainly was
+not your fault. And once out of that accursed house, _you_ were free."
+
+"Not my fault--no," she repeated, "but my responsibility afterward." She
+gazed past him out of the window where, at the curb, Arnold Rogers was
+assisting a fur-coated figure into the Paddington limousine. "You see,
+Edward Marstan was my husband and----Well, some day you may come to
+realize, Mr. Kenwick, that when a woman has loved, there is no such word
+as 'free.'"
+
+At the foot of the stairway Kenwick spoke with an almost curt
+suppression to Granville Jarvis. "I'm going over to the hotel with
+Morgan. Come over there."
+
+The other man made no reply save a slight inclination of his head, and
+there was in his eyes an expression which haunted and mystified the
+released prisoner.
+
+"Jarvis is a wizard," he said to Clinton Morgan as they walked the few
+short blocks to Mont-Mer's leading hostelry. "If they ever let down the
+bars of the court-room to men like that, they'll revolutionize legal
+procedure. He seems to have seen this case from every angle."
+
+"From more angles than you imagine," his friend replied. "And he had let
+me in on some of the most interesting of his findings that were not
+revealed in court. For instance, he examined that gardener this morning,
+just for his own satisfaction. The boy was willing, even flattered by
+the attention. Jarvis told me afterward that a witness like that ought
+to be ruled out of court. And he is typical of the mass of men and women
+who assist in acquitting the guilty and sending the innocent to the
+gallows. The average physician examining him would pronounce him normal.
+He can hear a sound distinctly, for instance, but he is afflicted with
+that common defect, the equivalent, Jarvis says, of color-blindness in
+the visual realm, which makes it impossible for him to tell whether the
+sound comes from behind or in front of him. And he lacks completely a
+visual memory. He could recall the exact words that Gifford said to him
+on the night of the suicide but he couldn't remember whether the body
+was covered or uncovered when he saw it. And as for the tests with
+Glover----By the way, what are you going to do with Glover?"
+
+"I don't know yet. I haven't got that far. I think I can forgive him
+everything except that infamous story about Everett being close with me
+while I was under age. Why, I had too much money while I was in college,
+Morgan. That's the chief reason why I didn't push my literary work with
+greater zeal. The creative temperament is naturally indolent. It
+requires a spur, not necessarily a financial one, but so much the better
+if it is. Of course Glover and I will have to have a financial
+reckoning. I can see now why my frantic messages to our family lawyer
+were never answered. I suppose he's had dozens of communications from
+people purporting to be connected by blood or marriage with the Kenwick
+estate. Yes, Glover has got some things to answer to me for, but----"
+His mind flew back to that last evening that he had spent in the
+fire-lit living-room on Pine Street. "He brought hell into my life for a
+time," he ended slowly. "But he brought--something else into it, too."
+
+It was half an hour later, after Kenwick had bathed and dressed for
+dinner, that Granville Jarvis came up to his room. Kenwick admitted him
+with an inarticulate word of greeting. Then while with fumbling fingers
+he put on a fresh collar, he made an attempt at normal conversation.
+
+"Been expecting you," he said. "Morgan is down in the lobby. We'll all
+have dinner here first and then----"
+
+"Can't do it," Jarvis cut in. "I have another engagement for dinner, and
+I'm leaving town on the eight-forty northbound. I just ran up to say
+good-by and--good luck."
+
+"Where are you going?"
+
+Jarvis smiled. "To Argentina, so far as you are concerned. But you can
+call it Columbia if you like. I'm returning to my work there. You see,
+I've been away on leave."
+
+"You've got to stay long enough for me to tell you something," Kenwick's
+voice cut in authoritatively. "But you couldn't stay long enough,
+Jarvis, for me to thank you for what you've done."
+
+His caller held up a hand. "Please don't. Not that--please."
+
+"But," Kenwick went on, "you've got to hear an apology. I was just about
+on the verge of a collapse over there, and when you got up in court as
+the representative of Glover----Well, I didn't know the game, you see
+and I thought----"
+
+"I know; Brutus." It was Jarvis who finished the sentence. "And in a
+sense, you were right," he went on slowly. "For what I did, I did--not
+for you."
+
+"You did it for science, of course; because to you I was an interesting
+case. But what can I ever do to repay you? How can----"
+
+"I have been paid." The same haunting, baffling expression was in the
+scientist's eyes, and he was not looking at the man whom his testimony
+had freed.
+
+"Oh, I don't mean money!" Kenwick cried hotly. "I know you have that!"
+
+"I don't mean money, either." He forced his gaze back to his host. And
+then that sixth sense which is in the soul of every creative artist
+awoke in Kenwick's being and made his eyes luminous with understanding.
+
+Jarvis picked up his hat from the chair into which it had dropped. "I'm
+going out to the Paddingtons' for dinner," he said casually. "I'll have
+about----" He snapped open the cover of his watch, then closed it again.
+"The most devilish thing about life on this planet, Kenwick, is that we
+can't do very much for each other. The game is largely solitaire. But
+for any good that I ever did I've been well repaid. Any man ought to be
+satisfied, I think, when the gods allow him two full hours--in Utopia."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+It was the morning after his acquittal that Kenwick and Marcreta Morgan
+drove out of the Paddington gateway in one of the Utopia machines. They
+turned to the left and took the stretch of perfect asphalt road that led
+to the old Raeburn house.
+
+The mystery of its destruction had never been explained. Richard Glover,
+and every one else who was connected with the case of Ralph Regan, had
+proved a satisfactory alibi. The owner of Rest Hollow had been notified
+by wire of its destruction and he had replied with orders that the
+grounds were to be kept locked and admission denied to all callers. It
+had undoubtedly been one of the handsomest homes in a community of
+handsome homes, but since the first days of its existence fate had
+destined it for tragedy. And perhaps its owner was relieved to know that
+only a pile of whitening ashes marked the grave of his own romance and
+the prison of another man's hope. At all events, the mystery of its
+passing never has been solved, and conjecture concerning it is still a
+favorite topic around the tea-tables of Mont-Mer's fashionable suburban
+district.
+
+"But I want to _see_ it in ruins," Kenwick had told Marcreta after their
+first radiant hour together. "I want to know that it is really gone off
+the face of the earth, so that when it comes to me in memory I can
+assure myself that it is only a dream."
+
+They turned the last corner and came suddenly in sight of the tall iron
+gate. Across it a sinister chain swung ominously, warning the world away
+from communication with that most dreadful affliction that can befall a
+human soul. The ruins of Rest Hollow loomed somber and shapeless before
+them, and Roger Kenwick brought his car to a stop in the very spot where
+Arnold Rogers had once halted, hesitated, and then gone on his way.
+Guarding the pile like a battered but relentless sentinel was the tall,
+charred chimney of the dining-room. As he looked at it, Kenwick's hand
+sought instinctively for that of the woman beside him, as though to
+assure himself of her reality. And then he heard himself ask the
+question that for so long had beaten against his brain.
+
+"How could you do it? How could you send me away that night, dear, into
+the horrors of war and--this, without hope?"
+
+"I couldn't know," she told him desperately. "I couldn't foresee what was
+coming. And I wanted you to win a place in the world. I wanted you to
+win, as I knew you could if you were unhampered by----"
+
+"Unhampered!" He echoed the word incredulously, as though it were quite
+new and its meaning not clear. "Is any one ever hampered by love and
+inspiration and all that----"
+
+"You don't understand," she said. "Nobody can understand physical
+disability except those who have suffered it. My mother had a sister who
+was a bed-ridden invalid. She helped her husband to find his place in
+the world and keep it. But he never seemed to realize that she had
+helped him. He always thought, though I suppose he never said, that his
+marriage had held him back. And she died at last of a broken heart.
+Through all my youth I had her tragedy before me."
+
+There was a moment of silence between them. And then Kenwick spoke
+slowly. "You hadn't much faith in me, Marcreta. You admit now that you
+loved me, yet you hadn't much faith--in my character or my----"
+
+"But love comes a long time before faith, Roger. It always does. And I
+was younger then. I didn't know so much about life and--and character.
+But, oh, when they wrote me about this! I would have given anything on
+earth to have lived over again our last night together!"
+
+"I know! I know!" His voice was vibrant with self-reproach.
+
+"Your brother must have been splendid," she went on. "He wrote me such a
+wonderful letter. But he couldn't soften it; nobody can ever dilute the
+big tragedies of life. We must drink them unstrained. I knew that you
+were somewhere in this county, and when I came down here, just that one
+time, I liked to feel that I was near you. I couldn't have endured to
+see you, but I wanted to be near you for a little while before--I did
+anything else. And then that night when you came back, I couldn't be
+sure----Everything was so changed. You were so different from the
+carefree boy who had gone away. I knew, of course, that you would be; in
+a sense, I wanted you to be. But I didn't want you to feel bound by
+anything that had gone before. I was afraid you might feel that way. Oh,
+a woman is at such a disadvantage, Roger. She is always at a
+disadvantage if the man she loves is honorable and chivalrous."
+
+"I had work to do," he reminded her gently. "I had to quiet the title to
+my name. For when a woman marries a man, Marcreta, she marries his past,
+every bit of it. Before I could offer my life to you again, I had to be
+certain that every minute of it was clean and decent and above reproach.
+I was not willing to let any of it go on the grounds of
+irresponsibility. I never would have been satisfied. And you never would
+have been satisfied. There would always have been for both of us
+terrible moments of doubt. The bramble-bush lay between us. I had to
+tear it away first; I had to tear it away and look bravely at whatever
+lay underneath."
+
+A shaft of golden sunlight suddenly broke through the January clouds and
+slanted across the road. Roger Kenwick's eyes followed it as though
+seeking for the treasure that might lie revealed at last at the end of a
+rainbow. A sharp exclamation escaped him. And he felt the quick response
+of the hand that still lay in his.
+
+Drawing the heavy motor-cloak closer about her, he helped Marcreta
+Morgan out of the car and guided her to a spot about a hundred yards on
+the other side of the iron gate. "I remember now!" His words came in the
+low, awed voice of one who suddenly encounters in broad daylight some
+object that has played conspicuous part in an evil and oft-recurring
+dream.
+
+"At last!" he said, and stood rooted to the roadside gazing at the thing
+for which, during the last two months, he had been so desperately
+groping. "This one thing," he went on, "this one thing about those
+impenetrable months here I do remember. I believe that if I had chanced
+to see it on that afternoon of my recovery, if I had only chanced to
+come this way instead of around by the other road, it might have
+restored to me some memory of this place."
+
+They stood now on the edge of the strip of pavement, where dead leaves
+spread a spongy carpet between the asphalt and the barbed-wire fence
+that bordered the opposite estate. And what they looked upon was a huge
+boulder, half embedded in the earth. By some mighty and persistent force
+it had been rent asunder, and now, up through the cleft which tore its
+surface with a long jagged scar, a sapling eucalyptus-tree, perfectly
+shaped and beautifully proportioned, had pushed its way. A zephyr or
+perhaps a bird had sown the seed in this rock-bound prison. And with a
+vitality that appeared incredible it had taken root and grown there,
+stretching vigorous, red-tipped leaves heavenward. In some miraculous
+manner its tap-root had found the sustaining soil, and its flame-colored
+crown the sunlight. There it stood, on the lonely road to Rest Hollow, a
+living torch of liberty, flaunting its heroic triumph above the
+shattered body of its foe.
+
+"On the day that Glover first brought me here, I saw that tree."
+Kenwick's voice was scarcely more than a whisper. "I remember looking
+out at it from an opening in the fence. I didn't know just why I was
+here, but I had a sense of--I can't describe it to you--but it was a
+sense of _imprisonment_. I knew that if I wanted to get out of that
+place I couldn't do it, and there's no feeling on earth like that. And
+then I saw--this, and it thrilled me. In a curious, unexplainable way it
+gave me hope. I don't recall anything else about the place, and I don't
+remember whether I ever saw this again. But during these last two months
+I have been looking for something that I knew I had lost out of my life,
+and here it is."
+
+Marcreta Morgan reached over and touched the sapling's damp bark with
+reverent fingers. From a cleft in the conquered boulder came the pungent
+odor of the crushed leaves that were sustaining this new life. She
+turned to the man beside her with shining eyes.
+
+"The resurrection!" she cried.
+
+He drew her close to him beneath the tender branches of the valiant
+little sapling.
+
+"An imprisoned soul," he whispered, "liberated at last--by the miracle
+of love."
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Rest Hollow Mystery, by Rebecca N. Porter
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 40416 ***