she did not herself
believe the architect had taken the southern trip, giving her reasons
for that suspicion, describing the three visits of Hugh Gordon and
recounting the assurances he had made her of Brand's safety and early
return.

"I haven't come to you before, Dr. Annister," she said, "because I
didn't like to worry you about it. I know what a nervous condition
Mildred is in, anyway, because she doesn't hear from him and I thought
that if she guessed the real state of affairs it would be ten times
harder for her."

"I fear Mildred will have a nervous collapse if he does not return
soon," said Dr. Annister gravely, "or we do not get some assurance
that all is well with him. You say that this Hugh Gordon declares he
doesn't know where Felix is?"

"Yes, that is what he says, but at the same time he seems so confident
there can be nothing wrong that when I talk with him I feel it will be
all right. And then afterwards I wonder if I am doing the right thing
in keeping it all so quiet. Do you think, Dr. Annister, that we ought
to put the case into the hands of the detectives? You know, if we did
that and then he should come back in a few days, as he did before, he
would be dreadfully annoyed."

Dr. Annister, in a shabby leather arm-chair, in whose roomy depths his
undersized figure seemed smaller than ever, leaned forward with his
elbows on its arms and thoughtfully struck together the ends of his
fingers.

They were in his private office, where this chair had been for twenty
years his favorite seat. It was his attitude and gesture of deepest
abstraction. Many a time, sitting thus, and gazing with intent eyes
on nothing at all, had he found light on difficult cases. And many a
nervous wreck among his patients had marched back to health and vigor
to the rhythmic tapping of those finger-ends.

Just now he was considering the possibility that Felix Brand, the
famous young architect, his son-in-law to be, might have sunk out of
sight intentionally in order to indulge in deeply hidden debauch.
Although it had but recently become manifest, that suggestion of
sensuality in the young man's refined and handsome countenance, the
physician's only ground of objection to the early marriage for which
his daughter and her lover had pleaded, had grown stronger of late.
But if Brand should be found in some low dive it might get out and the
carrion-loving sensational newspapers would make an ill-smelling
scandal into which Mild