Hooper ascertained that Miss Cazenove would return home about half-past six, to dress for dinner and the opera. None but an American could have extracted this information from a severe London footman. There is a charming affability, a dramatic good-fellowship, about our transatlantic cousins which ignores the traditional reserve of England. Racing back to the hotel, Hooper found Karl still asleep. At 6.35 P.M. he coolly telephoned to Miss Nora, and quite as coolly read her my letter of introduction over the wire. “I guess I shook her up good an’ hard,” he said to me, in the exchange of further confidences, and I quite believe it. He pressed inflexibly for an immediate interview. At all hazards, now, he was determined to make known to her the dangerous atmosphere in which her fiancée was existing. “Her voice was a bit scared as she discussed things,” he declared, “but, after chewing on it for a minute or two, she asked me to meet her at the opera at eight o’clock sharp. The lady who would chaperon her, and some other friends, would not be there until nearly nine. She would go in advance, leaving a message for her chaperon, and we could talk undisturbed. I allow I rather cottoned to a girl who could fix things as slick as that.” Karl was seemingly sunk in the sleep of sheer weakness. Hooper counted on meeting Nora and returning to the hotel in time to arouse Karl for a late meal, and then see him safely home, or even detain him for the night after explaining matters to his father and mother. Indeed, things were going so well that he was buoyed up with a new hope. He dressed rapidly, reached Covent Garden, and saw a lady whom he took to be Nora Cazenove descend from a brougham, cross the vestibule while darting an interrogatory glance at its denizens, and hasten up the stairs. He was right. An attendant took his card, the lady halted smilingly, and Hooper made himself known. A well-bred, bright-eyed, alert young American is seldom at a discount under such conditions. The spice of the unusual procedure, flavored by a certain curiosity, led Nora to receive him graciously, if with a not unnatural shyness arising from the innuendoes of my letter and Hooper’s own persistence in seeking the meeting. He lost no time in tackling the subject for which she had accorded the rendezvous. Once they were seated in the box, and the strains of the orchestra (how remarkably was music interwoven with the vital events of Karl’s career!) made it impossible for his voice to carry through the thin partitions on each side, Hooper plunged into a clear, decisive, and, to any ears save those of a woman in love, convincing history of Karl’s sixth sense and its latest astounding developments. Though she protested vehemently, and threatened (though probably not quite in earnest in this) to leave the theater, Hooper spared her no shred of the evidence which proved that Karl was killing himself on her account.