his mind full of poignant
memories and regrets for the loss of a friend he had revered and loved,
and to whom his debt was so incalculably great. The last two years,
indeed, had been for him terrible. To watch the swift decay of the
greatest combination of heart and brain he had ever known, and to
realize he was powerless to help, was a source of profound grief to him
that would remain to the end of his days.

At the same time an insatiable curiosity possessed him. The study of
dementia was, of course, outside his special province as a specialist,
but he knew enough of it to understand how small a matter might be the
actual cause of how great an illusion, and he had been devoured from the
very beginning by a ceaseless and increasing anxiety to know what the
professor had found in the sands of "Chaldea," what these precious
Tablets of the Gods might be, and particularly--for this was the real
cause that had sapped the man's sanity and hope--what the inscription
was that he had believed to have deciphered thereon.

The curious feature of it all to his own mind was, that whereas his
friend had dreamed of finding a message of glorious hope and comfort, he
had apparently found (so far as he had found anything intelligible at
all, and not invented the whole thing in his dementia) that the secret
of the world, and the meaning of life and death, was of so terrible a
nature that it robbed the heart of courage and the soul of hope. What,
then, could be the contents of the little brown parcel the professor had
bequeathed to him with his pregnant dying sentences?

Actually his hand was trembling as he turned to the writing-table and
began slowly to unfasten a small old-fashioned desk on which the small
gilt initials "M.E." stood forth as a melancholy memento. He put the key
into the lock and half turned it. Then, suddenly, he stopped and looked
about him. Was that a sound at the back of the room? It was just as
though someone had laughed and then tried to smother the laugh with a
cough. A slight shiver ran over him as he stood listening.

"This is absurd," he said aloud; "too absurd for belief--that I should
be so nervous! It's the effect of curiosity unduly prolonged." He smiled
a little sadly and his eyes wandered to the blue summer sky and the
plane trees swaying in the wind below his window. "It's the reaction,"
he continued. "The curiosity of two years to be quenched in a single
moment! The nervous tension, of course, must