To Achilles it was as if the hand of Zeus had reached and touched the child--and she was not. What god sheltered her beneath a magic veil--so that she passed unseen? He lifted his face, seeking in air and sun and cloud, a token. Over the lake came the great breeze, speaking to him, and out of the air a thousand hands reached to him--to tell him of the child. But he could not find the place that held her. In the dusky shop, he held his quiet way. No one, looking, would have guessed--“Two cen’s, yes,” and his swift fingers made change while his eyes searched every face. But the child, in her shining cloud, was not revealed. When he was summoned before the detectives and questioned, with swift sternness, it was his own questions that demanded answer--and got it. The men gathered in the library, baffled by the search, and asking futile, dreary questions, learned to wait in amusement for the quick, searching gestures flung at them and the eager face that seemed to drink their words. Gradually they came to understand--the Greek was learning the science of kidnapping--its methods and devices and the probable plan of approach. But the Chief shook his head. “You won’t trace these men by any of the old tricks. It’s a new deal. We shall only get them by a fluke.” And to his own men he said, “Try any old chance, boys, run it down--if it takes weeks--Harris won’t compromise--and you may stumble on a clue. The man that finds it makes money.” Gradually they drew their lines around the city; but still, from the tapped wires, the messages came--to them, sitting in conclave in the library--to Philip Harris in his bare office and to the mother, waiting alone in her room. At last she could not bear it. “I cannot hold out, Philip,” she said, one day, when he had come in and found her hanging up the receiver with a fixed look. “Don’t trust me, dear. Take me away.” And that night the big car had borne her swiftly from the city, out to the far-breathing air of the plain and the low hills. In her room in the house on the lake, her little telephone bell tinkled, and waited, and rang again--baffled by long silence and by discreet replies.... The tapped wires concentrated now upon Philip Harris, working by suggestion, and veiled threat, on his overwrought nerves till his hand shook when he reached out to the receiver--and his voice betrayed him in his denials. They were closing on him, with hints of an ultimatum. He dared not trust himself. He left the house to the detectives and went down to the offices, where he could work and no one could get at him. Every message from the outside world came to him sifted, and he breathed more freely as he took up the telephone. The routine of business steadied him. In a week he should be himself--he could return to the attack.