cisive as
though he did not know how to begin what he wanted to say. As he
glanced down at a key he took from his pocket, his indecision seemed to
receive direction and inspiration from it; and he put it down on Alan's
dresser.

"I've brought you," he said evenly, "the key to your house."

Alan gazed at him, bewildered. "The key to my house?"

"To the house on Astor Street," Sherrill confirmed. "Your father
deeded the house and its furniture and all its contents to you the day
before he disappeared. I have not the deed here; it came into my hands
the day before yesterday at the same time I got possession of the
pictures which might--or might not, for all I knew then--be you. I
have the deed down-town and will give it to you. The house is yours in
fee simple, given you by your father, not bequeathed to you by him to
become your property after his death. He meant by that, I think, even
more than the mere acknowledgment that he is your father."

Sherrill walked to the window and stood as though looking out, but his
eyes were blank with thought.

"For almost twenty years," he said, "your father, as I have told you,
lived in that house practically alone; during all those years a shadow
of some sort was over him. I don't know at all, Alan, what that shadow
was. But it is certain that whatever it was that had changed him from
the man he was when I first knew him culminated three days ago when he
wrote to you. It may be that the consequences of his writing to you
were such that, after he had sent the letter, he could not bring
himself to face them and so has merely ... gone away. In that case, as
we stand here talking, he is still alive. On the other hand, his
writing you may have precipitated something that I know nothing of. In
either case, if he has left anywhere any evidence of what it is that
changed and oppressed him for all these years, or if there is any
evidence of what has happened to him now, it will be found in his
house."

Sherrill turned back to Alan. "It is for you--not me, Alan," he said
simply, "to make that search. I have thought seriously about it, this
last half hour, and have decided that is as he would want it--perhaps
as he did want it--to be. He could have told me what his trouble was
any time in these twenty years, if he had been willing I should know;
but he never did."

Sherrill was silent for a moment.

"There are some things your father did just before he disappeared that