Of all the men in New York County there was one, however, who had a theory. This man was tall, slender, handsome, a man in authority. After the county detectives had given up the search, and after the newspaper reporters had faded from the scene, this man quietly went down to Brighton Beach and interviewed the clerk. "I wonder," he asked himself, as under his gruelling cross-examination the clerk searched the remotest confines of his memory, "I wonder what Wilkinson had in that brown paper bundle, and what became of it. Was it drowned, too?" But of all the people down at Brighton Beach, only one man _knew_ the movements of Peter V., and that was Peter V. himself. He had had his swim; he had gone far out, ducked and swam under water for a distance, and finally had gone ashore near Helmstaedter's pavilion--Helmstaedter's pavilion, where he belonged and where he was not known. Dripping, glowing from his bath, he had entered the pavilion with hundreds of bathers and gone at once to his booth. The rest was simple. Having dried himself, he once more donned the dry, Obermeyer bathing-suit, drew on top of that his second-hand suit of clothes, smashed his soft hat down on his head, and left the pavilion by the street entrance. And pushing through the back streets and alleyways which were crowded with the cheaper order of pleasure-seekers, eating "hot-dogs," he darted into a barber-shop and leaned back in the chair with a grunt of satisfaction. "Too hot for spinach, Tony," he remarked in the genial vernacular of the day, "so shave her off." Tony did as he was bid; and when Wilkinson rose and glanced into Tony's glass, he looked upon a countenance that he would never have recognised for his own. In former days his cheeks were plump and muscular, his chin bold, and his lips expressive. But for some years now a beard had covered his face; his lips and chin and jowls had been unused. So that not only was he not the Peter V. Wilkinson of the present day, but he was not the Peter V. Wilkinson of any day: he was just a very average man in a second-hand suit of clothes. "So long, Tony!" he sang out, and soon he was lost in the crowd. XXI Wandering aimlessly through Madison Square Park one evening ex-Governor Beekman suddenly felt someone tugging at his arm, and swinging round quickly to shake himself from the other's grasp, yet glancing down to see what sort of a person had accosted him, he saw that it was a woman, that she looked pale and weary, that her clothes were very shabby, and that she seemed to be in sad straits. Instantly he was conscious of a feeling of pity for her, at the same time he was angry with himself, angry with the fates that prevented him from doing what he had repeatedly done under similar circumstances in times past. For Beekman, always a tender, kind-hearted fellow, had never been one to look down upon less fortunate beings, and rarely lost an opportunity whereby he might do a kindness to some poor unfortunate.