"Do you remember the house--the number?"

"No, sir."

"Was it a private house?"

"I don't know. It was very tall. We lived on one floor and used an
elevator."

"I see. It was an apartment house."

The boy stood, with blonde head lowered, silently turning over the
leaves of an old magazine.

Marche walked out to the porch; his brows were bent slightly inward, and
he bit the end of his unlighted cigarette until the thing became
useless. Then he flung it away. A few stars watched him above the black
ramparts of the pines; a gentle wind was abroad, bringing inland the
restless voice of the sea.

In Marche's mind a persistent thought was groping in darkness, vainly
striving to touch and awaken memories of things forgotten. What was it
he was trying to remember? What manner of episode, and how connected
with this place, with the boy's book, with the portrait of his mother in
its oval frame? Had he seen that portrait before? Perhaps he had seen it
here, five years ago; yet that could not be, because Herold had not been
here then.

Was it the writing on the flyleaf that had stirred some forgotten
memory? It had seemed to him familiar, somehow--yet not like the
handwriting in Herold's business letters to him. Yet it _was_ Herold's
writing--"Jim, from Daddy"--that was the inscription. And that
inscription had riveted his attention from the first moment he saw it.

Who was Herold? Who was this man whose undoubtable breeding and personal
cultivation had stamped his children with the same unmistakable
distinction?

Somehow or other there had been a great fall in the world for him--a
terrible tumble from higher estate to land him here in this desolation
of swamp-bound silence--here where only the dark pines broke the vast
sky line, where the only sound was the far rumor of the sea. Sick,
probably with coast fever, poor, dependent, no doubt, on the salary
Marche paid him, isolated from all in the world that made the world
endurable to intelligence, responsible for two growing children--one
already a woman--what must be the thoughts of such a man on a night like
this, for instance?

"I want to see that man," he kept repeating to himself. "I want to see
him; and I'm going to."

Restless, but now always listening for the sound of a light tread which
he had come to know so well--alas!--he began to walk to and fro, with
keen glances toward the illuminated kitchen window every time he passed
it. Sometimes his mind was ch