Jerry came back to them on feet that no longer lilted to the music, her face sagging white against the painted masks of the girls on the floor. Crawf followed with a defiant expression, and Jim came last. “They don’t remember a thing,” said Jerry; “they’re perfect nitwits, the whole nest of ’em. Every waiter spilled a different description—the head waiter doesn’t even remember whether they were old or young.” “It seems to be the custom here,” said Jim, “to forget things like that!” “But the cash you forked out would have tickled their memory if there had been anything to tickle,” said Jerry. “What can we do now?” Joy asked limply. Somehow she had felt that coming down here would solve everything—that it was going to end up smoothly, things would explain themselves and roll into place, just like the ending of a story. The five stood in an indecisive little group, looking at each other. A waiter who had been darting his head around a corner to survey them at intervals now darted himself around and approached them with a velvet-covered but none the less insistent air. “If your party is not coming inside——?” They left as indecisively, and drove home in amazement. It had not occurred to them that they would not be able to read the dark pages of this affair. The sensation of utter futility is new to youth, and momentarily stuns. Until they had followed up every avenue of investigation left them, they had evaded the wings of horror that had been hovering ahead. Now there was room for all that awfulness. They spoke in low tones, the situation becoming more hopeless as they discussed it. Jim said the publicity of the police was not to be desired; Crawf and Dum-Dum, abject almost to cringing by now, said that of course they would finance investigation through a private detective agency, which proposition was speedily approved by Jerry. Joy sat in the tentacles of a memory that added horror. _What were the last words she had ever said to Sarah?_ A practical request to keep out of her life, and she, Joy, would do the same. Under the calcium ray of this dreadful evening’s events, her words were conceited, selfish, ill-tempered—self-sufficient. If one only knew, when words were flying around, that those were the last words that person would ever hear from one’s mouth—how many things would remain unsaid! A repressed goodnight to the two guilty youths, and leaving Jim, who was to go straight to the detective office. She and Jerry went to Sarah’s room of one accord, then wandered aimlessly through the empty-seeming apartment before going to bed. . . . “She’ll turn up,” said Jerry; but her voice hung fire. She did not turn up. Days thickened into weeks, with the detective bringing steady reports of investigation along a blank wall. Something that he had said on undertaking the case quivered in Joy’s memory. “A missing-girl proposition is almost hopeless, you know, when twelve thousand disappear every year.”