so had been born--born by the
mother whose ring waited him in the box in her room.

Alan, upon the morning of the second of these days, was driving
northward along the long, sandy peninsula which separates the blue
waters of Grand Traverse from Lake Michigan; and, thinking of her, he
knew that she was near. He not only had remembered that she would be
north at Harbor Point this month; he had seen in one of the Petoskey
papers that she and her mother were at the Sherrill summer home. His
business now was taking him nearer them than he had been at any time
before; and, if he wished to weaken, he might convince himself that he
might learn from her circumstances which would aid him in his task.
But he was not going to her for help; that was following in his
father's footsteps. When he knew everything, then--not till then--he
could go to her; for then he would know exactly what was upon him and
what he should do.

His visits to the people named on those sheets written by his father
had been confusing at first; he had had great difficulty in tracing
some of them at all; and, afterwards, he could uncover no certain
connection either between them and Benjamin Corvet or between
themselves. But recently, he had been succeeding better in this latter.

He had seen--he reckoned them over again--fourteen of the twenty-one
named originally on Benjamin Corvet's lists; that is, he had seen
either the individual originally named, or the surviving relative
written in below the name crossed off. He had found that the crossing
out of the name meant that the person was dead, except in the case of
two who had left the country and whose whereabouts were as unknown to
their present relatives as they had been to Benjamin Corvet, and the
case of one other, who was in an insane asylum.

He had found that no one of the persons whom he saw had known Benjamin
Corvet personally; many of them did not know him at all, the others
knew him only as a name. But, when Alan proceeded, always there was
one connotation with each of the original names; always one
circumstance bound all together. When he had established that
circumstance as influencing the fortunes of the first two on his lists,
he had said to himself, as the blood pricked queerly under the skin,
that the fact might be a mere coincidence. When he established it also
as affecting the fate of the third and of the fourth and of the fifth,
such explanation no longer sufficed; and he found