I have not told you yet," he went on. "The reason I have not told them
is that I have not yet fully decided in my own mind what action they
call for from me. I can assure you, however, that it would not help
you now in any way to know them."

He thought again; then glanced to the key on the dresser and seemed to
recollect.

"That key," he said, "is one I made your father give me some time ago;
he was at home alone so much that I was afraid something might happen
to him there. He gave it me because he knew I would not misuse it. I
used it, for the first time, three days ago, when, after becoming
certain something had gone wrong with him, I went to the house to
search for him; my daughter used it this morning when she went there to
wait for you. Your father, of course, had a key to the front door like
this one; his servant has a key to the servants' entrance. I do not
know of any other keys."

"The servant is in charge there now?" Alan asked.

"Just now there is no one in the house. The servant, after your father
disappeared, thought that, if he had merely gone away, he might have
gone back to his birthplace near Manistique, and he went up there to
look for him. I had a wire from him to-day that he had not found him
and was coming back."

Sherrill waited a moment to see whether there was anything more Alan
wanted to ask; then he went out.

CHAPTER IV

"ARRIVED SAFE; WELL"

As the door closed behind Sherrill, Alan went over to the dresser and
picked up the key which Sherrill had left. It was, he saw, a flat key
of a sort common twenty years before, not of the more recent corrugated
shape. As he looked at it and then away from it, thoughtfully turning
it over and over in his fingers, it brought no sense of possession to
him. Sherrill had said the house was his, had been given him by his
father; but that fact could not actually make it his in his
realization. He could not imagine himself owning such a house or what
he would do with it if it were his. He put the key, after a moment, on
the ring with two or three other keys he had, and dropped them into his
pocket; then he crossed to a chair and sat down.

He found, as he tried now to disentangle the events of the afternoon,
that from them, and especially from his last interview with Sherrill,
two facts stood out most clearly. The first of these related more
directly to his father--to Benjamin Corvet. When such a man as
Benjamin Corvet must hav