Clara who answered with another question. "Didn't he get to the
colonies? Didn't he die there?"

Judge Buller caught it with a snap of his fingers. "Got it!" he
triumphed, and the two men turned square upon him. "They ran him to
earth in Australia. That was the year I was there--'96. I got a snapshot
of him at the time."

It was now the whole table that turned on him, and Flora felt, with that
unanimous movement, something crucial, the something that she had been
waiting for; and yet she could in no way connect it with what had
happened, nor understand why Clara, why Harry, why Kerr above all should
be so alert. For more than all he looked expectant, poised, and ready
for whatever was coming next.

"What sort of a chap?" he mused and fixed the judge a moment with the
same stare that Flora remembered to have first confronted her.

"What sort? Sort of a criminal," the judge smiled. "They all look
alike."

"Still," Clara suggested, "such a man could hardly have been ordinary--"

"In the chain-gang--oh, yes," said Buller with conviction.

"Oh! Then the picture wasn't worth anything?"

"Why, no," Buller admitted slowly, "though, come to think of it, it
wasn't the chain-gang either. They were taking him aboard the ship. The
crowd was so thick I hardly saw him, and--only got one shot at him. But
the name was a queer one. It stuck in my mind."

"But then," Clara insisted, "what became of him?"

"Oh, gave them the slip," the judge chuckled. "He always did. Reported
to have changed ships in mid-ocean. Hal, is that another bottle?"

Harry stretched his hand for it, but it stayed suspended--and, for an
instant, it seemed as if the whole table waited expectant. Had Buller's
camera caught the clear face of Farrell Wand, or only a dim figure?
Flora wondered if that was the question Harry wanted to ask. He
wanted--and yet he hesitated, as if he did not quite dare touch it. He
laughed and filled the glasses. He had dropped his question, and there
was no one at the table who seemed ready to put another.

And yet there were questions there, in all the eyes; but some impassable
barrier seemed to have come between these eager people, and what, for
incalculable reasons, they so much wanted to know. It was not the genial
indifference with which Buller had dropped the subject for the
approaching bottle. It seemed rather their own timidity that withheld
them from touching this subject which at every turn produced upon some
one of