ial desk and the hope of exclusively publishing the news of the
Gray Seal's capture in the MORNING NEWS-ARGUS, to tell me I was looking
seedy. It's wonderful the way a little paint will metamorphose a man!
Well, anyway, here's for a good hot tub to-night, and a fresh start!"

He quickened his pace. There were still three blocks to go, and here was
no hurrying, jostling crowd to impede his progress; indeed, as far as he
could see up the Drive, there was not a pedestrian in sight. And then,
as he walked, involuntarily, insistently, his mind harked back into the
old groove again.

"I've tried to picture her," said Jimmie Dale softly to himself. "I've
tried to picture her a hundred, yes, a thousand times, and--"

A bus, rumbling cityward, went by him, squeaking, creaking, and rattling
in its uneasy joints--and out of the noise, almost at his elbow it
seemed, a voice spoke his name--and in that instant intuitively he KNEW,
and it thrilled him, stopped the beat of his heart, as, dulcet, soft,
clear as the note of a silver bell it fell--and only one word:

"Jimmie!"

He whirled around. A limousine, wheels just grazing the curb, was
gliding slowly and silently past him, and from the window a woman's
arm, white-gloved and dainty, was extended, and from the fingers to the
pavement fluttered an envelope--and the car leaped forward.

For the fraction of a second, Jimmie Dale stood dazed, immovable, a
gamut of emotions, surprise, fierce exultation, amazement, a strange
joy, a mighty uplift, swirling upon him--and then, snatching up the
envelope from the ground, he sprang out into the road after the car. It
was the one chance he had ever had, the one chance she had ever given
him, and he had seen--a white-gloved arm! He could not reach the car,
it was speeding away from him like an arrow now, but there was something
else that would do just as well, something that with all her cleverness
she had overlooked--the car's number dangling on the rear axle, the
rays of the little lamp playing on the enamelled surface of the plate!
Gasping, panting, he held his own for a yard or more, and there floated
back to him a little silvery laugh from the body of the limousine, and
then Jimmie Dale laughed, too, and stopped--it was No. 15,836!

He stood and watched the car disappear up the Drive. What delicious
irony! A month of gruelling, ceaseless toil that had been vain, futile,
useless--and the key, when he was not looking for it, unexpectedl