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?

"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?"