Now that he thought of it, the memory was clear. It was one of those books that had whetted his passion for the past, when his student mind was first kindling to buried cities and forgotten tombs and all the strange store and loot of time. Paul Delcassé. He didn't remember a word of the book, but he remembered that he had read it with absorption. And now the special agent, delighted at the recognition, was talking eagerly of the writer. "He was a brilliant young man, monsieur, but he was of no importance to his generation--and he becomes so now through the whim of a capricious woman to disinherit her other heirs. After all this time she has decided to make active inquiries." "But you said that Delcassé had died--" "He left a wife and child. Her letters of her husband's death reached his relatives in France, then nothing more. They feared that the same fever--but nothing, positively, was known.... A sad story, monsieur.... This Delcassé was young and adventurous and an ardent explorer. An ardent lover, too, for he brought a beautiful French wife to share the hazards of his expedition--" "An ardent idiot," thrust in McLean unfeelingly. "Knocking a woman about the desert.... Not much chance of a clue after all these years," he concluded with a very British air of dismissal. But the French agent was not to be sundered from the American who remembered the book of Delcassé. From his pocket he brought a leather case and from the case a large and ornate gold locket. "His picture, monsieur." He pressed the spring and offered Ryder the miniature. "It was done in France before he returned on that last trip, and was left with the aunt. It is said to be a good likeness." Ryder looked down upon the young face presented to his gaze with a feeling of sympathy for this unlucky searcher of the past who had left his own secret in the sands he had come to conquer--sympathy mingled with blank wonder at the insanity which had brought a woman with it.... McLean couldn't understand a man's doing it. Jack Ryder couldn't understand a man's _wanting_ to do it. Love to Ryder was incomprehensible idiocy. Woman, as far as he was concerned, had never been created. She was still a spectacle, an historical record, an uncomprehended motive. "Nice looking chap," he commented briefly, fingering the curious old case as he handed it back. "I'll keep up the inquiries," McLean assured them, "but, as I said, nothing will come of it.... It's been fifteen years. One more grain lost in the desert of sand.... By luck, you know, you might just stumble on something, some native who knew the story, but if fever carried them off and the Arabs rifled their camp, as I fancy, they'll jolly well keep their mouths shut. No white man will know.... I don't advise your people to spend much money on the search."