"You miss something by sleeping at the back. Just as I was comfortably in bed, the room was flooded with the blinding white glare that indicates a passing automobile. This particular white glare, however, did not vanish as usual. It remained. My attention, which was only partially aware of it, gradually became undivided and led me to sit up and look out. A large car stood opposite the house next door, the two headlights showing up the roadway and sidewalk all down the street. Even as I watched, a tall figure came down from the house and the lights went out. I could see the car plainly as a dark mass under the trees. And that, for the best part of half an hour, was all I did see. I lay down again and tried to focus my mind on this problem. I don't mind admitting I am still without a solution. I lay there thinking all sorts until the white glare suddenly illuminated the room again. I looked out. The car moved, turned slowly round, and sped away down Pine Street." They sat and looked at me. "I know I ought to have told you before," I said, "but the fact is I was so puzzled this morning when I woke and remembered the incident, that I didn't know what to do. It seems silly, if you look at it in the cold light of day, to draw any conclusions from such a trivial thing. I mean, if we had known nothing about them...." "You think he's visiting her?" said Bill gravely. "I didn't say so," I answered, "but the notion was in my mind, certainly. If so, why should he not? If Mac had a brother, and he came to New York he would not hesitate to come and see you." "Not in the middle of the night," she objected. "No, unless he was pressed for time, and had, shall we say, more urgent claims on his attention." "Perhaps he came to visit his brother, not knowing he was away just now." "I thought of that too. Where is he supposed to be just now?" "Lord? Jimmy said he was up-state visiting Gottschalk, the millionaire who is backing the Aerial Mail Company." Nobody spoke for a minute or two. At length my friend rose and pushed his chair up against the table. "Ah, well," he said, looking for his pipe, "we can't sit here chewing the rag all day." I was sitting at my desk, biting my pen and staring absently at the whitey-brown vista of the garden with the cold blue ridge of the Orange Mountains showing through the delicate tracery of the wind-swept trees, when I heard Bill moving about the room behind me. "You're not working," she observed perfunctorily. I nodded assent. I often wonder, to tell the truth, when I _do_ work. Even when no one is by to tell me of it, I seem to spend most of my time in idleness. "I was thinking," I said. Perhaps I was. She came up to my chair and looked out too. "About--you know--last night?" she asked. "Yes, I was thinking you, being a woman, would know better than I whether there is a storm brewing." She was silent, merely looking out at the wintry landscape.