“I won’t come in,” whispered Tom excitedly, “I’ve got the trick. There’s another entrance to his rooms. We’ll cage him between us and get a good look at him, anyway. There’s a little office corresponding to this on the other side, where I can wait. You stay by the bay window and watch for me. If he comes my way, wave to me. If he comes yours, I’ll wave to you. Gee! I haven’t had more fun for an age.” Off Tom travelled, down the stairs, walking with an exaggerated caution, and I turned in, smiling. Dorothy had not roused at the interruption. I began to worry a bit about this strange abstractedness. Could she be quite well? No, that was quite foolish, for she seemed the picture of health. Then the footsteps took my attention for a moment,--one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, turn, and repeat. It was like the trampling of feet in the “Tale of Two Cities.” The single footstep seemed to swell into a roar of charging troops. Was this walker the man who was trying to stop all war? Were the footsteps above and around those of the thousands he had slain or that he was to slay? Were we marching among the ghostly shades of the future? Were we in that crowding throng? What dreadful mystery lay behind the wooden panels of those windows? I fell to speculating on the appearance of the stranger behind the wall, and always the form of the man who was trying to stop all war took on the slight graceful form of a Southerner, and the face was the clear swarthy face of Regnier. Try as I might, I could not give the shadowy man we pursued any other face or form. The footsteps went on and on. Dorothy aroused. “Where’s Tom?” she said, looking around. “He’s away for a moment,” I said, slightly mendaciously. “He’ll be back shortly.” “He ought to have told me he was going,” she said, a little impatiently, but her reverie proved too strong for her to escape, and she sank back into her dreamy abstraction. The twilight began to come down as we sat watching and as I listened. As it fell, the fire’s rose played yet more softly on Dorothy’s beautiful hands lying on the arm of her chair, showed a bit of rounded cheek and a translucent shell-like ear. Gradually I forgot my whole mission. The man became a ghost and faded silently away. Tom waiting on tiptoe in the office next door was quite forgotten. Dorothy and I and the fire. This new Dorothy, dreamy, quiet, almost clinging, with those new depths in her eyes, was carrying me quite beyond myself. “Dorothy,” I said, in a low voice, “Dorothy.” She turned. “What is it, Jim?” she said. I tried to speak but I could not. The rushing words overwhelmed me. I could not make myself intelligible, and I sat there shivering with the intensity of my feeling, and yet unable to say what I wished. I found my voice again. “Dorothy,” I began, “I want to tell you.”