When dinner was over, the nurse gone back to the patient and Captain Harrison to his club, Cutty lit his odoriferous pipe and patrolled the windows of his study. Ever since Kitty's departure he had been mulling over in his mind a plan regarding her future--to add a codicil to his will, leaving her five thousand a year, so Molly's girl might always have a dainty frame for her unusual beauty. The pity of it was that convention denied him the pleasure of settling the income upon her at once, while she was young. He might outlive her; you never could tell. Anyhow, he would see to the codicil. An accident might step in. He got out his chrysoprase. In one corner of the room there was a large portfolio such as artists use for their proofs and sketches; and from this he took a dozen twelve-by-fourteen-inch photographs of beautiful women, most of them stage beauties of bygone years. The one on top happened to be Patti. The adorable Patti!... Linda, Violetta, Lucia. Lord, what a nightingale she had been! He laughed laid the photograph on the desk, and dipped his hand into a canvas bag filled with polished green stones which would have great commercial value if people knew more about them; for nothing else in the world is quite so beautifully green. He built tiaras above the lovely head and laid necklaces across the marvellous throat. Suddenly a phenomenon took place. The roguish eyes of the prima donna receded and vanished and slate-blue ones replaced them. The odd part of it was, he could not dissipate the fancied eyes for the replacement of the actual. Patti, with slate-blue eyes! He discarded the photograph and selected another. He began the game anew and was just beginning the attack on the problem uppermost in his mind when the phenomenon occurred again. Kitty's eyes! What infernal nonsense! Kitty had served merely to enliven his tender recollections of her mother. Twenty-four and fifty-two. And yet, hadn't he just read that Maeterlinck, fifty-six, had married Mademoiselle Dahon, many years younger? In a kind of resentful fury he pushed back his chair and fell to pacing, eddies and loops and spirals of smoke whirling and sweeping behind him. The only light was centred upon the desk, so he might have been some god pacing cloud-riven Olympus in the twilight. By and by he laughed; and the atmosphere--mental--cleared. Maeterlinck, fifty-six, and Cutty, fifty-two, were two different men. Cutty might mix his metaphors occasionally, but he wasn't going to mix his ghosts. He returned to his singular game. More tiaras and necklaces; and his brain took firm hold of the theme which had in the beginning lured him to the green stones. Two-Hawks. That name bothered him. He knew he had heard it before, but never in the Russian tongue. It might be that the chap had been spoofing Kitty. Still, he had also called himself Hawksley.