times--other and quite
different names had been substituted; the pages had become finally
almost illegible, crowded scrawls, rewritten again and again in
Corvet's cramped hand. Alan strained forward, holding the first sheet
to the light.

[Illustration: list of names and addresses]

Alan seized the clippings he had looked at before and compared them
swiftly with the page he had just read; two of the names--Westhouse and
French--were the same as those upon this list. Suddenly he grasped the
other pages of the list and looked them through for his own name; but
it was not there. He dropped the sheets upon the table and got up and
began to stride about the room.

He felt that in this list and in these clippings there must be,
somehow, some one general meaning--they must relate in some way to one
thing; they must have deeply, intensely concerned Benjamin Corvet's
disappearance and his present fate, whatever that might be, and they
must concern Alan's fate as well. But in their disconnection, their
incoherence, he could discern no common thread. What conceivable bond
could there have been uniting Benjamin Corvet at once with an old man
dying upon a poor farm in Emmet County, wherever that might be, and
with a baby girl, now some two years old, in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin?
He bent suddenly and swept the pages into the drawer of the table and
reclosed the drawer, as he heard the doorbell ring and Wassaquam went
to answer it. It was the police, Wassaquam came to tell him, who had
come for Luke's body.

Alan went out into the hall to meet them. The coroner's man either had
come with them or had arrived at the same time; he introduced himself
to Alan, and his inquiries made plain that the young doctor whom Alan
had called for Luke had fully carried out his offer to look after these
things, for the coroner was already supplied with an account of what
had taken place. A sailor formerly employed on the Corvet ships, the
coroner's office had been told, had come to the Corvet house, ill and
seeking aid; Mr. Corvet not being at home, the people of the house had
taken the man in and called the doctor; but the man had been already
beyond doctors' help and had died in a few hours of pneumonia and
alcoholism; in Mr. Corvet's absence it had been impossible to learn the
sailor's full name.

Alan left corroboration of this story mostly to Wassaquam, the
servant's position in the house being more easily explicable than his
own; bu