e abnormal, but nothing else occurred. At last,
trembling violently, he wiped the thick moisture from his forehead and
dabbed at the blood which he still felt on his chin.

But when he looked at his handkerchief, he muttered:

"Well, I'll be jiggered!"

The handkerchief bore not the slightest trace of blood.

* * * * *

Under the light in his bedroom, Northwood examined the wallet. It was
made of alligator skin, clasped with a gold signet that bore the initial
M. The first pocket was empty; the second yielded an object that sent a
warm flush to his face.

It was the photograph of a gloriously beautiful girl, so seductively
lovely that the picture seemed almost to be alive. The short, curved
upper lip, the full, delicately voluptuous lower, parted slightly in a
smile that seemed to linger in every exquisite line of her face. She
looked as though she had just spoken passionately, and the spirit of her
words had inspired her sweet flesh and eyes.

Northwood turned his head abruptly and groaned, "Good Heavens!"

He had no right to palpitate over the picture of an unknown beauty. Only
a month ago, he had become engaged to a young woman whose mind was as
brilliant as her face was plain. Always he had vowed that he would never
marry a pretty girl, for he detested his own masculine beauty sincerely.

He tried to grasp a mental picture of Mary Burns, who had never stirred
in him the emotion that this smiling picture invoked. But, gazing at the
picture, he could not remember how his fiancee looked.

Suddenly the picture fell from his fingers and dropped to the floor on
its face, revealing an inscription on the back. In a bold, masculine
hand, he read: "Your future wife."

"Some lucky fellow is headed for a life of bliss," was his jealous
thought.

He frowned at the beautiful face. What was this girl to that hideous
hunchback? Why did the handsome stranger warn him, "_The thing inside
never will be yours_?"

Again he turned eagerly to the wallet.

In the last flap he found something that gave him another surprise: a
plain white card on which a name and address were written by the same
hand that had penned the inscription on the picture.

Emil Mundson, Ph. D.,
44-1/2 Indian Court

Emil Mundson, the electrical wizard and distinguished scientific writer,
friend of the professor of science at the university where Northwood was
an assistant professor; Emil Mundson, whom, a week ago