tisements and invitations and bills, many of which had come while I
was out there at the edge of things.

Could it be, I asked myself, that Keller had forgotten me, too? Had it
been possible that the card upon which I had so carefully written my
address had been misplaced? I had been willing to put off the moment at
San Francisco. Now I found myself eagerly impatient for the answer.

In the breakfast-room I encountered the doctor, who was dallying over a
cup of coffee and a morning paper. He glanced up and for a moment his
eyes lingered.

"Hello," he said, "how long have you been gone?"

"Little less than a year."

"You went away a youngish sort of man and you return with distinguished
white temples." He summarized. "There must be a story locked up in you."

I glanced impatiently at the card and called for eggs.

"I haven't been nibbling at life this time," I retorted with some touch
of asperity.

"I didn't instruct you to gluttonize," he reminded me.

I gave him only a partial history. Even the revised version of my
adventures, which I had by this time learned to tell glibly enough to
conceal the fact that I was omitting the major part, was sufficiently
beyond the rut of things to beguile a half-hour in the eventless walls
of a Manhattan club. But my table-companion eyed me with his customary
and disquieting sharpness, and finally fell into his old habit of
diagnosis.

"Something is lying heavily on your mind, Deprayne," he announced, "and
it's not merely the memory of cannibals and exposure. Dangers of that
sort become pleasant reminiscences when we view them through the
retrospective end of the glasses. There's something else. What is it?"

I laughed at him over my raised coffee-cup. This was one man above all
others in whom I should not confide the facts. He would promptly have
prescribed a sanatorium.

"Nonsense!" I scoffed, and just as I said it a bell-boy arrived at the
table with a telegram on a small silver tray.

"A message for Mr. Deprayne."

I was totally unable to control the violent start that caused the cup to
drop on the tablecloth with a crash, and doubtless made my face
momentarily pale. My effort at regained composure did not escape the
doctor. I saw his eyes narrow and heard him murmur, "Nerves. Shaken
nerves."

I took the telegram, calmly enough. I had had my moment of excitement
and was again calm. I even held the missive unopened as the dining-room
boys spread a clean napkin ove