It was the mention of the name quite as much as the subject of their conversation which started in motion all that mysterious machinery which forces the present far out of its proper focus, disregards the future, and brings into the limelight those events of the past which the intervening years have magnified. No one can really explain it, and the wise make no attempt. "Marian Thatcher," Cosden had said. She was Marian Seymour when he had known her, twenty-odd years before, and the Marian he had known married a man named Thatcher right under the very noses of the legion of admirers, himself included, who fluttered about her. Of course it was only a coincidence, this combination of names, for the girl Cosden spoke of was only twenty; but just as substances combined by chemists in their laboratories begin to ferment and produce unwonted conditions, so did the combination of those two names start in Montgomery Huntington's brain that series of mental pictures which caused him to forget that the hour had come when sane persons of his age and disposition sought repose. This was not the first time that he had thus outraged Nature, and for the selfsame cause. Not a year of the more than twenty had passed without at least one mental pilgrimage to the shrine which had become more and more sacred as time piled itself on time. Satisfied that he alone was awake in the house, Huntington rose and drew a small table before his chair, and with a key taken from his pocket unlocked the drawer. It was a curious performance at that hour of night, and he seemed to be filled with guilty apprehensions, for he glanced from time to time at the closely-curtained door as if fearing interruption. The lock yielded readily and the contents of the drawer lay in front of him. Then, before seating himself again, he laid a fresh log on the open fire, turned off the lights, and resumed his favorite seat, with the table and the open drawer before him, illumined only by the flickering glare from the fireplace. For a moment he threw himself back in his chair, shading his eyes with his hand as if the mental picture was even more delectable than the sight of the actual objects before him. Then he sat upright again, with a deep sigh, and transferred from the open drawer to the top of the table a most remarkable collection of articles, which seemed to belong to any one else rather than to him.