“I 'll go and fetch a couple of bunches of keys. We may find one to fit.” He went out and soon afterward returned, the keys jingling in his pocket. Ripley was at the hall telephone as they passed. “I 'm going up to Mr. Risca's,” said Herold. In a few moments they were speeding across London. Unity sat very tense, her red hands clenched together till the knuckles showed white. “The house first, and then Scotland Yard,” he said. “We must know first,” she assented. He glanced at her admiringly. “You 're one of the bravest girls I 've ever met.” She shrugged her shoulders. “It is n't a time for playing the fool and going into hysterics,” she said bluntly. Many girls of her mongrel origin would have broken down under the strain, shed wild tears, uttered incoherences of terror. Not so Unity. “She is the kind that walks through fire,” thought Herold. They spoke little. He grew sick with anxiety. Lady Blount's letter had been the determining cause of John's flight from home. Of this there could be no question. It had not been a sane man who raved at him yesterday. He was primed for any act of madness. The letter was the spark. Stella ill, fading away to a ghost and as silent as one, victim to an obscure and wasting disease that baffled them all; Stella dying before their eyes--the unhappy picture of the beloved was poignant in its artlessness. It would have stirred to grief any friend of Stellamaris. What emotions, then, had it not aroused in the breast of the man who loved her desperately, and whose very love had brought her to this pitch of suffering, to this imminence of dissolution? And the appeal for help, for the immediate presence of the rock and tower of strength of the household, with what ironic force had that battered at the disordered brain? There were only three courses for a man situated like Risca, and gifted or afflicted with Risca's headstrong and gloomy temperament, to pursue: to surrender to the appeal, which he had not done; to find his friend and bid him stand by while he cursed the day he was born and the God who made him and the devil-ruled welter of infamy which called itself a world, which likewise he had not done; or, in a paroxysm of despair and remorse, to fling himself beyond reach of human touch and seek a refuge for himself in the darkness. The conclusion that he had taken this last course forced itself with diabolical logic on Herold's mind. The very key to the door of darkness had lain ready to his hand, hidden in the study drawer. Before the eyes of the imaginative man, strung tight almost to breaking-point by the morning's emotions, flashed vivid pictures of tragic happenings--so vivid that they could not but be true: the reading of the letter; John standing by the study table; the letter dropping from his hands, which, in familiar gesture, went to the crisp, grizzly hair; the bloodshot eyes,--he had noted them yesterday,--the heavy jaw momentarily hanging loose, then snapping tight