"But there's no way of ventilating this. There's no way of knocking a window in it. It's--it's only a blank wall." "Why a blank wall?" I inquired. He turned and looked past me, with unseeing eyes. "_Because I can't remember_," he said in a voice which made it seem that he was speaking more to himself than to me. He looked about him, with a helplessness that was pitiful. "I can't remember!" he repeated, with the forlornness of a frightened child. "That's exactly what I wanted to get at," I cried, with a pretense at confident and careless intimacy. "So let's clear away in front of the blank wall. Let's at least try a kick or two at it." "It's no use," he complained. "Well, let's try," I persisted, with forced cheerfulness. "Let's get at the beginning of things." "How far back do you want me to go?" he finally asked. He spoke with the weary listlessness of a patient confronted by an unwelcome practitioner. "Let's begin right at the first," I blithely suggested. He sat looking at his shaking fingers for a moment or two. "There's really nothing much to begin at," he tried to explain. "These things don't seem to begin in a minute, or an hour, or a day." "Of course not," I assented as I waited for him to go on. "The thing I noticed at the time, about the only thing I even thought of, was that my memory seemed to have a blind spot--a blind spot the same as an eye has." "Ill?" I asked. "Or overworking?" "I guess I'd been pounding away pretty hard. I know I had. You see, I wanted to make good in that office. So I must have been biting off more than I could chew." "What office?" I asked as he came to a stop. He looked up at me with a stare of dazed perplexity. "Didn't I tell you that?" he asked, massaging his frontal bone with the ends of his unsteady fingers. "Why, I mean John Lockwood's office." "John Lockwood?" I repeated, with a sudden tightening of the nerves. "Do you mean the railway-investment man, the man who made so many millions up along the northwest coast?" The youth in the chair nodded. And I made an effort to control my feelings, for John Lockwood, I knew only too well, was the father of Mary Lockwood. He, like myself, had exploited the Frozen North, but had exploited it in a manner very different from mine. "Go on," I said, after quite a long pause. "Lockwood brought me down from the Canadian Northern offices in Winnipeg. He said he'd give me a chance in the East--the chance of my life." "What were you in his office?" "I suppose you'd call it private secretary. But I don't think he knew what I was himself." "And he let you overwork yourself?" "No, I can't say that. It wasn't his fault. You see, his work this summer kept him out at the coast a good deal of the time. He had an English mining engineer named Carlton looking over some British Columbia interests." "And you carried on the office work while Lockwood was out west?"