"Then go back into your room there. From that room I want you to bring me a letter. Not any old letter, but one particular letter. I want you to bring me the Carlton registered letter which you signed for. I want you to see it, and feel it, and bring it here." I threw all the authority of my being into that command. I had to justify both my course and my intelligence. I had to get my man over the high jump, or crawl away humiliated and defeated. I stared at the man, for he was not moving. I tried to cow him into obedience by the very anger of my look. But it didn't seem to succeed. "Don't you understand," I cried. "I want you to bring that registered letter in to me, here, now!" He looked at me a little blankly. Then he passed his hand over his moist forehead. "But we tried that before," he falteringly complained. "We tried that, and it wouldn't work. I brought the letter in the first time, and you weren't here." I sat up as though I had been shot. I could feel a tingle of something go up and down my backbone. My God, I thought, the man's actually stumbling on something. The darkness was delivering itself of an idea. "Yes, we tried that before," I wheedled. "And what happened?" "You weren't here," he repeated, in tones of such languid detachment that one might have thought of him as under the influence of a hypnotist. "But I'm here now, so bring me the letter!" I tried to speak quietly, but I noticed that my voice shook with suppressed excitement. Whether or not the contagion of my hysteria went out to him I can not say. But he suddenly walked out of the room, with the utmost solemnity. The moment I was alone I did a thing that was both ridiculous and audacious. Jerking open Lockwood's private drawer, I caught up a perfecto from a cigar-box I found there. This perfecto I impertinently and promptly lighted, puffing its aroma about, for it had suddenly come home to me how powerful an aid to memory certain odors may be, how, for instance, the mere smell of a Noah's Ark will carry a man forty years back to a childhood Christmas. I sat there busily and abstractedly smoking as Criswell came into the room and quietly stepped up to my desk. In his hand he carried a letter. He was solemn enough about it, only his eyes, I noticed, were as empty as though he were giving an exhibition of sleep-walking. He reminded me of a hungry actor trying to look happy over a _papier-mâché_ turkey. "Here's a letter for Carlton, sir," he said to me. "Had I better send it on, or will you look after it?" I pretended to be preoccupied. Lockwood, I felt, would have been that way, if the scene had indeed ever occurred. Lockwood's own mind must have been busy, otherwise he would have carried away some definite memory of what had happened. I looked up, quickly and irritably. I took the letter from Criswell's hand, glanced at it, and began absently tapping my left thumb-tip with it as I peered at the secretarial figure before me.