“You didn’t know, then,” he said, “that he was dead?” Dead! Corey dead! So that was what he had to tell. There sprang up in my mind a vague, indefinite vision of something heroic in connection with the Great War. When, I asked, and where did he die? “A little over three months ago, in Europe. I was his executor.” There was something in the way he made his last statement which lent it a kind of special importance. And it proved, indeed, in the end, the fact of supreme importance. And here, as if it were due me, he told me his name—Ewing; and I told him mine. “Yes,” he said. “I made a trip to New York to see a man who’d been with him before he died. He brought a message from Corey. Queer,” he said, “that message. He must have been—a little off, you know, at the last.” It was clear that something had occurred on his trip to New York which had puzzled him then, and continued, in spite of his explanation, to puzzle him still. It was evident in the way he went back, presently, to the beginning, as if he were stating a problem or building up a case. He began by saying that he supposed nobody in Dubuque ever had understood Corey—“and yet”—he faced me—“you wouldn’t say he was hard to understand?” I said that he had seemed to me to have an extremely straightforward and simple personality; that that, to me, had been one of his charms. “Exactly!” he said, “exactly! That’s what we always thought in Dubuque—and I’ve known Jim Corey since the day he was born. Why, he’d go away on one of his trips, and stay a year, sometimes two, and the day after he’d get back you’d think he’d never been out of Dubuque, except he was so glad to be home.” And, talking with a growing and homely fluency, the nasal quality of his rather pleasant voice increasing according to the sharpness of his interest, he proceeded to sketch in, with the fine brush of his provincialism, all the details of that picture I had had so clearly of Corey that night in Paris, more than four years before. It was astonishing how right my picture had been; how they, who had known him always, had been no better able than I to visualize Corey outside Dubuque. And it seemed to have been the merest chance which had led him, the year of his graduation from medical school, to take his first trip away from his native State. He had “put himself” through college, and had come out with all the school had to give, wanting more. It was doubtful if Corey had ever read a novel through in his life, but the college library yielded up treasures in scientific and medical books whose plots he remembered as easily as boarding-school girls remember the plots of Laura Jean Libbey.