a last resort h asked:

"They could not have sailed under an assumed name, could they?"

"I can't say as to that. Where are they going?"

"Graustark."

But the young man shook his head slowly, Lorry's shaking in unconscious
accord.

"Are you sure that you saw the young lady on board?"

"Well, rather!" exclaimed Lorry, emphatically.

"I was going to say there are a lot of Italian and German singers on the
ship, and you might have been mistaken. But since you are so positive,
it seems very strange that your friends are not on the list."

So Lorry went away discouraged and with a vague fear that she might have
been a prima donna whose real name was Guggenslocker but whose stage
name was something more euphonious. He instantly put away the thought
and the fear. She was certainly not an opera singer--impossible!
He drove back to his hotel, and made preparations for his return to
Washington. Glancing casually over the register he came to the name
that had been haunting him--Guggenslocker! There were the names, "Caspar
Guggenslocker and four, Graustark." Without hesitation he began to
question the clerk.

"They sailed on the Kaiser Wilhelm to-day;" said that worthy. "That's
all I know about them. They came yesterday and left to-day."

Mr. Grenfall Lorry returned to Washington as in a dream--a fairy dream.
The air of mystery that had grown from the first was now an impenetrable
wall, the top of which his curiosity could not scale. Even his fancy,
his imagination, served him not. There was but one point on which he was
satisfied: he was in love. His own condition was no mystery.

Several weeks later he went to New York to question the Captain of
the Wilhelm, hoping to clear away the clouds satisfactorily. To his
amazement, the captain said there had been no Guggenslockers on board
nor had there been persons answering the description, so far as he could
tell.

Through the long hot summer he worked, and worried, and wondered. In the
first, he did little that was satisfactory to himself or to his uncle;
in the second, he did so much that he was advised by his physician to
take a rest; in the last, he indulged himself so extensively that it had
become unbearable. He must know all about her? But how?

The early months of autumn found him pale and tired and indifferent
alike to work and play. Ha found no pleasure in the society that
had known him as a lion. Women bored him; men annoyed him; the play
suffocated him; the