at the person he sought had departed and that her address
was unknown. So he wrote Nan again, using her married name and
addressed her at Port Agnew, Washington. You will remember, of course,
that at this time Nan's marriage was not known to Port Agnew, she had
kept it secret. Naturally the postmaster here did not know anybody by
that name, and in due course, when the letter remained unclaimed he
did not bother to advertise it but returned it to the sender."

"It doesn't seem possible," Mrs. McKaye declared, quite pop-eyed with
excitement.

"It was possible enough," her son continued drily. "Well, the
bewildered pawnbroker thrust the license away in his desk, and awaited
the next move of the man in the case. But he never moved, and after a
while the pawnbroker forgot he had the license. And the minister was
dead. One day, in cleaning out his desk he came across the accumulated
papers in the case and it occurred to him to write the state board of
health and explain the situation. Promptly he received a letter from
the board informing him that inquiries had been made at the board of
health office for a certified copy of the license, by Miss Nan Brent,
of Port Agnew, Washington, and that the board had been unable to
furnish such a certified copy. Immediately our obliging and
intelligent pawnbroker, whose name, by the way, is Abraham Goldman,
bundled up the marriage license, together with the carbon copy of the
pawn ticket he had given the thief; a press clipping from the San Jose
_Mercury_ recounting the story of the capture of the thief; carbon
copies of all his correspondence in the case, the original of all
letters received, the photograph of the check--everything, in fact, to
prove a most conclusive case through the medium of a well-ordered and
amazing chain of optical and circumstantial evidence. This evidence he
sent to Miss Brent, Port Agnew, Washington, and she received it about
a week before I married her. Consequently, she was in position to
prove to the most captious critic that she was a woman of undoubted
virtue, the innocent victim of a scoundrel who had inveigled her into
a bigamous marriage. Of course, in view of the fact that the man she
went through a legal marriage ceremony with already had a wife living,
Nan's marriage to him was illegal--how do you express it? Ipso facto
or per se? In the eyes of the law she had never been married; the man
in the case was legally debarred from contracting another marr