than I--you know people everywhere, Anthony!
You'll have to help me by calling them up and having them call up their
friends, you know. That--that may do some good. I--I don't know! I don't
know what I'm talking about, Anthony! I feel as if I'd gone crazy!"

"You act very much that way," Anthony said quietly. "What's wrong?"

Robert Vining gaped at him and then laughed quite insanely.

"Wrong!" he shouted. "Wrong! _Mary's disappeared!_"

"Mary----"

"You don't know Mary--no, of course not!" young Mr. Vining rushed on.
"She--she's the girl I'm going to marry, Anthony! Yes, I'm engaged,
although it hasn't been announced yet. I've been engaged for a week now,
and we--great Heaven! I can't think. I--why, Anthony, I was talking to
her even at dinner last night and there was never a hint that she even
meant to go out of the house. In fact, when we parted, she seemed rather
bored at the idea of staying home and--why, not a soul knows even when
she left the house! She's gone, Fry! She's just _gone_!"

A coarse nature ever, Johnson Boller winked at Anthony and turned his
back!

"Mary! Why, my little Mary out alone at night----" young Robert choked.
"She's just twenty, Anthony--a delicate, beautiful girl like that
disappearing from the most beautiful, the happiest home in all New York!
Why, from the day she was born, Dalton never spared her a penny to----"

"Eh? What Dalton?" Anthony asked suddenly.

"What? Theodore Dalton, of course. He's her father--Dalton, the
patent-medicine man, Anthony. You must have met him? You know Theodore
Dalton?"

Curiously, fortunately enough, sheer nervous tension jerked him away
from Anthony Fry just then and set him to pacing the floor, a man
distracted, a man unseeing, a man who recked of nothing on earth beyond
his terrible and immediate grief.

And this was very well indeed, for Anthony was making himself
conspicuous!

Anthony took three backward steps and looked at the unconscious Robert
much as if the young man had branded himself a leper. He looked at
Johnson Boller, too, although his eyes were blank--and then, one hand on
his head, Anthony staggered straight out of the room and into the
corridor; and, having gone that far, he turned and staggered down to the
window at the end of the window-seat, where he collapsed much as if the
bones had been whisked from his long, slender legs!

Here Johnson Boller, following, found him five seconds later. Mr.
Boller, who was beginning to