The reader ran through it with increasing absorption. Then, pencil in hand, he attacked the first part of the precious screed and emerged from a scene of literary carnage with one brief paragraph in hand and the slaughtered bodies of many eloquent pages strewing the floor. That one paragraph stated that Preston Jax, whose real name was John Preston, had, after a rebellious boyhood, run away to sea, lived two years before the mast, picked up a smattering of education, been assistant and capper for a magnetic healer, and had finally formulated a system of astrological prophecy that won him a slow but increasing renown. The gist of the system was to assign some particular and often imaginary star to every subject, and, by a natural aptitude for worming out secrets from the credulous, lead them along the celestial paths of mysticism to a point where he could reach their pocketbooks. He had been specially successful with women. One bit of his philosophy Kent had preserved unaltered. “They bite slower than men; but when they do take hold, they swallow the hook so deep that you’re lucky to get it back at all.” An hour’s work with a pencil that should have been blue resolved the document, under Kent’s skilful and remorseless editorship, into its salient elements. Obviously it was impossible to put it into alien hands for copying. Kent ordered up a typewriter and copied it himself. The duplicate he enclosed in his letter to Sedgwick. The original he put aside to sleep upon. Thus it ran: “This Astræa affair looked good from the first,” so began Preston Jax’s confession, as beheaded and stripped down by its editor. “It looked like one of the best. You could smell money in it with half a nose. She bit first on one of the occult ads—the number four of the old series, a double-column with display in heavy-faced italics and leaded out strong. That ad always was a good woman-fetcher. Her first letter came in on a Monday, I recollect. It was a big mail. There were a lot of Curiositys and a couple of Suspiciouses, and this was one of half a dozen in the True Believers’ pile. Irene, my assistant, had put the red pencil on it, when she sorted out the mail, to show it was something special. But don’t get her into this, Professor Kent. If you do, it’s all off, jewels and all. Irene has always been for the straight star business and forecast game, and no extras or side lines. Besides, we were married last week.