e list of
American shipowners. I did not give Corvet this as my reason; and he
made me at that time a very strange counter-proposition--which I have
never been able to understand, and which entailed the very obliteration
of my name which I was trying to avoid. He proposed that I accept a
partnership in his concern on a most generous basis, but that the name
of the company remain as it was, merely Corvet and Spearman.
Spearman's influence and mine prevailed upon him to allow my name to
appear; since then, the firm name has been Corvet, Sherrill, and
Spearman.

"Our friendship had strengthened and ripened during those years. The
intense activity of Corvet's mind, which as a younger man he had
directed wholly to the shipping, was directed, after he had isolated
himself in this way, to other things. He took up almost feverishly an
immense number of studies--strange studies most of them for a man whose
youth had been almost violently active and who had once been a lake
captain. I cannot tell you what they all were--geology, ethnology,
nearly a score of subjects; he corresponded with various scientific
societies; he has given almost the whole of his attention to such
things for about twenty years. Since I have known him, he has
transformed himself from the rather rough, uncouth--though always
spiritually minded--man he was when I first met him into an educated
gentleman whom anybody would be glad to know; but he has made very few
acquaintances in that time, and has kept almost none of his old
friendships. He has lived alone in the house on Astor Street with only
one servant--the same one all these years.

"The only house he has visited with any frequency has been mine. He
has always liked my wife; he had--he has a great affection for my
daughter, who, when she was a child, ran in and out of his home as she
pleased. He would take long walks with her; he'd come here sometimes
in the afternoon to have tea with her on stormy days; he liked to have
her play and sing to him. My daughter believes now that his present
disappearance--whatever has happened to him--is connected in some way
with herself. I do not think that is so--"

Sherrill broke off and stood in thought for a moment; he seemed to
consider, and to decide that it was not necessary to say anything more
on that subject.

"Recently Corvet's moroseness and irritability had very greatly
increased; he had quarreled frequently and bitterly with Spearman over
b