Away in the distance he saw a gigantic red brick building bearing the gilded sign “Atlantic Hotel,” and he was about to stoop and pick up the menu card--thinking to discover his whereabouts by that means--when his attention was drawn to two persons who separated themselves from a laughing party grouped near the band-stand. The couple, a tall, slightly-built foreign-looking man, and a very pretty girl, whose costume and figure alike bespoke her youth, slowly drew nearer to the hotel veranda. Grier experienced no amazement when he recognized in the man, Constantine, the Armenian. The young lady was unknown to him at first, until some gesture, accompanied with a smile and a quick upward glance of the eyes, recalled Mrs. Hutchinson, and he reflected that Maggie’s mother must have looked like that when she was eighteen. So this was Maggie herself! How extraordinary! But what was Constantine saying that her face should flame and her big brown eyes survey him so scornfully. They were both talking vehemently. In his eagerness Karl bent forward to listen. He was inclined to step from off the veranda and join them. Perhaps Constantine, the Armenian, required to be kicked. At that instant he was conscious of a sharp pain in his left hand. He was plunged into a dark void, and he came to his ordinary senses to find that he had escaped from falling through the window into the quadrangle only because he had pressed his left hand heavily on the top of a pointed stick used to support some flowers in a window-box. CHAPTER IV A CAT AND FRANK HOOPER In relation to the every-day affairs of life, Karl Grier had nerves of iron, controlled by a well-ordered brain. “As soon as I recovered my wits,” he said, laughingly, afterwards, “I closed the window, examined the injury to my hand, which was painful but of little account, undressed, and went to bed, resolutely determined to sleep. I knew I was overwrought, and that the worst thing I could do was to strive uselessly to read the puzzle of the trance, or vision, I had just experienced. I estimated that it had lasted nearly a quarter of an hour. During those fifteen minutes I had seemingly paid a visit to the United States. That would suffice for one evening. I closed my eyes, endeavored to construct equipotential lines on an imaginary surface containing two electrified spheres, and, as a consequence, was soon sound asleep.”