The situation assumed altogether a different angle. There was a hint of tragedy in her eyes. More trivial things than a forgotten pair of gloves have brought about death and division. Together they renewed the search. They sifted the manuscripts, the books, the magazines, burrowed into the drawers; and sometimes their hands touched, but they neither noticed nor felt the contact. Warrington even dropped to his knees and hunted under the desk, all the while "Jack Bennington, Jack Bennington!" drumming in his ears. The search was useless. The gloves were nowhere to be found. He stood up irresolute, dismayed and anxious, keenly alive to her misery and to the inferences his best friend might draw. The desk stood between them, but their faces were within two spans of the hand. "I can't find them." "They are gone!" she whispered. Chapter IV When the pathfinders came into the territory which is now called the Empire State, they carried muskets and tripods under one arm and Greek dictionaries under the other. They surveyed all day and scanned all night, skirmishing intermittently with prowling redskins. They knew something about elementary geometry, too, and you will find evidences of it everywhere, even in the Dutch settlements. The Dutchman always made the beauty of geometry impossible. Thus, nowadays, one can not move forward nor backward fifty miles in any direction without having the classic memory jarred into activity. Behold Athens, Rome, Ithaca, Troy; Homer, Virgil, Cicero; Pompey and Hannibal; cities and poets and heroes! It was, in those early days, a liberal education to be born in any one of these towns. Let us take Troy, for instance. When the young mind learned to spell it, the young mind yearned to know what Troy signified. Then came Homer, with his heroic fairy-story of gods, demigods and mortals. Of one thing you may be reasonably sure: Helen was kept religiously in the background. You will find no city named after her; nor Sappho, nor Aspasia. The explorer and the geographer have never given woman any recognition; it was left to the poets to sing her praise. Even Columbus, fine old gentleman that he was, absolutely ignored Isabella as a geographical name.