!"

"Didn't you say 'she,' Captain?"

"No, I did not."

"I beg your pardon, then, for anticipating you," said the Tracer
carelessly.

"Anticipating? _How_ do you know it is not a man I am in search of?"
demanded Harren.

"Captain Harren, you are unmarried and have no son; you have no father,
no brother, no sister. Therefore I infer--several things--for example,
that you are in love."

"I? In love?"

"Desperately, Captain."

"Your inferences seem to satisfy you, at least," said Harren almost
sullenly, "but they don't satisfy me--clever as they appear to be."

"_Ex_actly. Then you are _not_ in love?"

"I don't know whether I am or not."

"I do," said the Tracer of Lost Persons.

"Then you know more than I," retorted Harren sharply.

"But that is my business--to know more than you do," returned Mr. Keen
patiently. "Else why are you here to consult me?" And as Harren made no
reply: "I have seen thousands and thousands of people in love. I have
reduced the superficial muscular phenomena and facial symptomatic aspect
of such people to an exact science founded upon a schedule approximating
the Bertillon system of records. And," he added, smiling, "out of the
twenty-seven known vocal variations your voice betrays twenty-five
unmistakable symptoms; and out of the sixteen reflex muscular symptoms
your face has furnished six, your hands three, your limbs and feet six.
Then there are other superficial symptoms--"

"Good heavens!" broke in Harren; "how can you prove a man to be in love
when he himself doesn't know whether he is or not? If a man isn't in
love no Bertillon system can make him so; and if a man doesn't know
whether or not he is in love, who can tell him the truth?"

"I can," said the Tracer calmly.

"What! When I tell you I myself don't know?"

"_That_," said the Tracer, smiling, "is the final and convincing
symptom. _You_ don't know. _I_ know because you _don't_ know. That is
the easiest way to be sure that you are in love, Captain Harren, because
you always are when you are not sure. You'd know if you were _not_ in
love. Now, my dear sir, you may lay your case confidently before me."

Harren, unconvinced, sat frowning and biting his lip and twisting his
short, crisp mustache which the tropical sun had turned straw color and
curly.

"I feel like a fool to tell you," he said. "I'm not an imaginative man,
Mr. Keen; I'm not fanciful, not sentimental. I'm perfectly healthy,
perfectly normal--a ver