e--Alan or Conrad?"

"No, father."

"No reference either to any one living in Kansas, or to a town there
called Blue Rapids?"

"No, father. Who is Alan Conrad?"

"I do not know, dear. I never heard the name until to-day, and Henry
Spearman had never heard it. But it appears to be intimately connected
in some way with what was troubling Uncle Benny yesterday. He wrote a
letter yesterday to Alan Conrad in Blue Rapids and mailed it himself;
and afterward he tried to get it back, but it already had been taken up
and was on its way. I have not been able to learn anything more about
the letter than that. He seems to have been excited and troubled all
day; he talked queerly to you, and he quarreled with Henry, but
apparently not about anything of importance. And to-day that name,
Alan Conrad, came to me in quite another way, in a way which makes it
certain that it is closely connected with whatever has happened to
Uncle Benny. You are quite sure you never heard him mention it, dear?"

"Quite sure, father."

He released her and, still in his hat and coat, went swiftly up the
stairs. She ran after him and found him standing before a highboy in
his dressing room. He unlocked a drawer in the highboy, and from
within the drawer he took a key. Then, still disregarding her, he
hurried back down-stairs.

As she followed him, she caught up a wrap and pulled it around her. He
had told the motor, she realized now, to wait; but as he reached the
door, he turned and stopped her.

"I would rather you did not come with me, little daughter. I do not
know at all what it is that has happened--I will let you know as soon
as I find out."

The finality in his tone stopped her from argument. As the house door
and then the door of the limousine closed after him, she went back
toward the window, slowly taking off the wrap. She saw the motor shoot
swiftly out upon the drive, turn northward in the way that it had come,
and then turn again, and disappear. She could only stand and watch for
it to come back and listen for the 'phone; for the moment she found it
difficult to think. Something had happened to Uncle Benny, something
terrible, dreadful for those who loved him; that was plain, though only
the fact and not its nature was known to her or to her father; and that
something was connected--intimately connected, her father had
said--with a name which no one who knew Uncle Benny, ever had heard
before, with the name of Alan