ou--and safe. I've hunted her and I haven't found her.
Perhaps she has hidden purposely from me. Perhaps she _wouldn't_ hide
from you--"

Boone raised a hand, and it fell limply at his side. He dropped abruptly
into a chair and cradled his face on his bent forearms. But after a
short while he rose, lividly colourless of check, and said:

"I'll ride back with you. I'm going to New York to find her."

But when he had been a month in New York he knew as little as when he
had come.

One morning he read a brief item hidden away on an inside page of his
newspaper. A young woman had taken gas in a boarding house in the
Forties. She had been there only a few days and, save by the name she
had given, was unknown. A few dollars in change had been found in her
bedroom, but no letters or identifying data. She was tall, well dressed,
and had been beautiful. Her body lay, awaiting claim, in an undertaker's
shop of given address. In default of identification, it would be turned
over for burial among the pauper dead.

Boone Wellver dropped the paper and went stumblingly across his room for
his hat. At his door he paused to steady the palsy that had seized him.
In his mind he was seeing a little girl at a Christmas dance, in a hall
where the tempered glow of mahogany and silver awoke to the tiny fires
of candle-light.

CHAPTER XLV

As Boone's taxi wrenched its way uptown, threading jerkily in and out
between the pillars of the Sixth Avenue Elevated, he sought vainly to
close the sluice gates of fear and hold his equilibrium by a
self-hypnosis of arrested thought.

But words of newsprint broke through this factitious barrier. The "brown
hair" of the reportorial description might be the same that McCalloway
had called a disputed dominion along the border land of gold and brown.
The "evidences of former beauty" might be an unappreciative appraisement
of _her_, badgered by misfortunes to her death.

Standing at last on the curb before the undertaker's establishment,
Boone had to be reminded to pay his fare, because his attention dwelt
with a morbid fascination on the gilt words, "Funeral Directors and
Embalmers," etched on the black plate glass of the windows.

After an appreciable interval of struggle with panic, he drew himself
together and went in through the open door, becoming instantly conscious
of a subtle, chemical odour.

From his newspaper a man in broadly patterned green and lavender
shirt-sleeves lifted his