his time not at the storm which seemed to be
dying down a bit, but at a sharp ring from the telephone on a desk at the
other side of the room.

"The deuce!" exclaimed Hayden getting on his feet. "Who on earth is
calling me such a night as this?" He walked over and lifted the receiver
with the usual curt, "Hello!"

"Is this Mr. Hayden's apartment?" asked a voice which made him start. It
was low, full, deliciously musical and with an unmistakable Spanish
accent.

"Yes, and this is Mr. Hayden speaking," was Robert's response, with a
lightning change of tone. A quick, excited thrill of interest ran over
him. He strove to place that voice, ransacked his memory in the effort to
do so, but quite in vain. He was, however, in spite of such swift,
momentary precautions, absolutely convinced that he was listening to
those enchanting tones for the first time. "Who is this speaking?" he
asked. But only a burst of low, rippling laughter with a faint hint of
mockery in it reached him.

"I'm afraid I'm rude enough to insist upon maintaining my incognito
to-night," was the demure answer.

"But that puts me at once at a disadvantage," protested Hayden.

"Naturally," the laughter in her voice was irresistible now. "That is
where a man ought to be."

"That is where he usually is anyway," he remarked. "But you must admit
that there is something awfully uncanny about a situation like this. On
so wild a night one would be justified in expecting almost any kind of a
ghostly visitant."

"Bar them out," she advised. "Remember Poe's Raven who still is sitting,
never flitting, on the pallid bust of Pallas, just above the chamber
door."

Hayden glanced up involuntarily. "There isn't any pallid bust of Pallas,"
he announced. "But that jolly old raven's method of paying a visit was
crude and commonplace compared to yours. He came tapping and rapping in
the most old-fashioned way; but you reach me with a wonderful disembodied
voice through the ever mysterious avenue of the telephone. It really
makes me creepy. Won't you locate it? Give it a name?"

"Scientists," she reminded him in her delicious, broken English, "can
reconstruct all kinds of extinct animals and birds from one small bone,
or a tooth, or a beak, or hoof."

"So might I," Hayden valorously asserted, "if I had as much to go on; but
a voice is different."

"Quite beyond your powers," she taunted.

"Not at all. I hadn't finished," Hayden was something of a Gascon at
heart,