ch. The search was longer
and more difficult than the seeker had anticipated. It required but
little effort to learn that Dr. Hartley had been dead for months, and
that his family had gone away from the roomy house where their home had
been for many years. To learn more was for a time impossible. He had
known little of the family kinship and connections, and it seemed as if
an adverse fate pursued his attempts to find the hidden links which bind
together the people of a great city. But George Henry persisted, and his
heart grew warm within him. He hummed an old tune as he walked quickly
along the crowded streets, smiling to himself when he found himself
singing under his breath the old, old song:

Who is Silvia? What is she
That all swains commend her?

In another quarter of the city, far removed from her former home and
neighbors, George Henry at last found Sylvia, her mother and a younger
brother, living quietly with the mother's widowed sister. During his
search for her the image of the woman he had once hoped might be his
wife had grown larger and dearer in his mind and heart. He wondered how
he had ever given her up, and how he had lived through so much
suffering, and then through relief from suffering, without the past and
present joy of his life. He wondered if he should find her changed. He
need have had no fears. He found, when at last he met her, that she had
not changed, unless, it may be, to have become even more lovable in his
eyes. In the moment when he first saw her now he knew he had found the
world again, that he was no longer a stranger in it, that he was living
in it and a part of it. A sweetheart has been a tonic since long before
knights wore the gloves of ladies on their crests. Within a week,
through Sylvia, he had almost forgotten that one can get lost, even as a
lost child, in this great, grinding world of ours, and within a year he
and Mrs. George Henry Harrison were "at home" to their friends.

After a time, when George Henry Harrison had settled down into steady
and appreciative happiness, and had begun to indulge his fancies in
matters apart from the honeymoon, there appeared upon the wall over the
fireplace in his library a picture which unfailingly attracted the
attention and curiosity of visitors to that hospitable hearth. The
scene represented was but that upon an island in the Bering Sea, and
there was in the aspect of it something more than the traditional
abomination of desolat