Harren hesitated. "I--there is--seems to be--something almost sacred to
me in that photograph. . . . You understand me, do you not? Yet, if it
will help you in finding her--"

"Oh," said the Tracer in guileless astonishment, "you desire to find
this young lady. Why?"

Harren stared. "Why? Why do I want to find her? Man, I--I can't live
without her!"

"I thought you were not certain whether you really could be in love."

The hot color in the Captain's bronzed cheeks mounted to his hair.

"_Ex_actly," purred the Tracer, looking out of the window. "Suppose we
walk around to your rooms after luncheon. Shall we?"

Harren picked up his hat and gloves, hesitating, lingering on the
threshold. "You _don't_ think she is--a--dead?" he asked unsteadily.

"No," said Mr. Keen, "I don't."

"Because," said Harren wistfully, "her apparition is so superbly healthy
and--and glowing with youth and life--"

"That is probably what sent it half the world over to confront you,"
said the Tracer gravely; "youth and life aglow with spiritual health. I
think, Captain, that she has been seeing you, too, during these three
years, but probably only in her dreams--memories of your encounters with
her subconscious self floating over continents and oceans in a quest of
which her waking intelligence is innocently unaware."

The Captain colored like a schoolboy, lingering at the door, hat in
hand. Then he straightened up to the full height of his slim but
powerful figure.

"At three?" he inquired bluntly.

"At three o'clock in your room, Hotel Vice-Regent. Good morning,
Captain."

"Good morning," said Harren dreamily, and walked away, head bent, gray
eyes lost in retrospection, and on his lean, bronzed, attractive face an
afterglow of color wholly becoming.

CHAPTER IX

When the Tracer of Lost Persons entered Captain Harren's room at the
Hotel Vice-Regent that afternoon he found the young man standing at a
center table, pencil in hand, studying a sheet of paper which was
covered with letters and figures.

The two men eyed one another in silence for a moment, then Harren
pointed grimly to the confusion of letters and figures covering dozens
of scattered sheets lying on the table.

"That's part of my madness," he said with a short laugh. "Can you make
anything of such lunatic work?"

The Tracer picked up a sheet of paper covered with letters of the
alphabet and Roman and Arabic numerals. He dropped it presently and
picked up