lf to fix no time when he
abandoned that hope, or even to change them after he had learned that
she was dead? Alan thought not; Sherrill had said that Corvet had
known from the first that his separation from his wife was permanent.
The bed made up, the other things neglected, and evidently looked after
or dusted only at long separated periods, looked more as though Corvet
had shrunk from seeing them or even thinking of them, and had left them
to be looked after wholly by the servant, without ever being able to
bring himself to give instructions that they should be changed. Alan
felt that he would not be surprised to learn that his father never had
entered these ghostlike rooms since the day his wife had left him.

On the top of a chest of high drawers in a corner near the dressing
table were some papers. Alan went over to look at them; they were
invitations, notices of concerts and of plays twenty years old--the
mail, probably, of the morning she had gone away, left where her maid
or she herself had laid them, and only picked up and put back there at
the times since when the room was dusted. As Alan touched them, he saw
that his fingers left marks in the dust on the smooth top of the chest;
he noticed that some one else had touched the things and made marks of
the same sort as he had made. The freshness of these other marks
startled him; they had been made within a day or so. They could not
have been made by Sherrill, for Alan had noticed that Sherrill's hands
were slender and delicately formed; Corvet, too, was not a large man;
Alan's own hand was of good size and powerful, but when he put his
fingers over the marks the other man had made, he found that the other
hand must have been larger and more powerful than his own. Had it been
Corvet's servant? It might have been, though the marks seemed too
fresh for that; for the servant, Sherrill had said, had left the day
Corvet's disappearance was discovered.

Alan pulled open the drawers to see what the other man might have been
after. It had not been the servant; for the contents of the
drawers--old brittle lace and woman's clothing--were tumbled as though
they had been pulled out and roughly and inexpertly pushed back; they
still showed the folds in which they had lain for years and which
recently had been disarranged.

This proof that some one had been prying about in the house before
himself and since Corvet had gone, startled Alan and angered him. It
broug