when you lived with your
mother. Aren't there?"

"I was very little," hesitated Willem, echoing a phrase he had once
heard Marta use in speaking of his earlier days.

"Still," pursued the Dead Man, "you remember?"

"I--I was afraid," replied the boy, groping back in the blurred past
for a fact and seizing on a gruesomely prominent one.

"Try to think back to that time," urged Peter Grimm. "You loved--_her_?"

"Oh, I _did_ love Anne Marie!" exclaimed the child.

"Now," pointed out the Dead Man, "through that one little miracle of
love you can remember many things that are tucked away in the back of
your baby brain. Hey? Things that a single spark could kindle and light
up and make clear to you. It comes back? Think! There were you--and Anne
Marie----"

"And the Other One," suggested Willem on impulse.

"So! And who was the 'Other One'?"

"I'm afraid----" babbled the child.

And again the Dead Man shifted the form of his questions to quiet the
nervous dread that had sprung into the big eyes.

"Willem," said he, "what would you rather see than anything else in all
this world? Think. Something that every little boy loves?"

"I--I like the circus," hazarded Willem, setting his tired wits to work
at this possible conundrum, "and the clowns, and----"

He hesitated. Peter Grimm motioned toward the photograph's fragments on
the desk.

"----and my mother," finished the boy.

Then, his gaze following the Dead Man's gesture, he caught sight of part
of a pictured face, torn diagonally across. With a cry he picked it up.

"Why," he exclaimed, "there she is! There's her face,--part of it. And,"
fumbling among the torn bits of cardboard, "there's the other part. It's
a picture of Anne Marie. All torn up."

"It would be fun to put it together," suggested Peter Grimm, "the way
you did with those picture puzzles I got you once. Suppose we try?"

The idea caught the child's fancy. With knitted brows and puckered lips
he bent over the desk and began the task of piecing the scraps into a
whole.

"That's right," approved the Dead Man. "Put it all together until the
picture is all perfect.--See, there's the bit you are looking for to
finish off the shoulder,--and then we must show it to everybody in the
house, and set them all to thinking."

With an apprehensive glance over his shoulder toward the front door
Willem proceeded more hurriedly with his work of joining the strewn
pieces.

"I must get it put together befor