But when he had been a month in New York he knew as little as when he had come. One morning he read a brief item hidden away on an inside page of his newspaper. A young woman had taken gas in a boarding house in the Forties. She had been there only a few days and, save by the name she had given, was unknown. A few dollars in change had been found in her bedroom, but no letters or identifying data. She was tall, well dressed, and had been beautiful. Her body lay, awaiting claim, in an undertaker's shop of given address. In default of identification, it would be turned over for burial among the pauper dead. Boone Wellver dropped the paper and went stumblingly across his room for his hat. At his door he paused to steady the palsy that had seized him. In his mind he was seeing a little girl at a Christmas dance, in a hall where the tempered glow of mahogany and silver awoke to the tiny fires of candle-light. CHAPTER XLV As Boone's taxi wrenched its way uptown, threading jerkily in and out between the pillars of the Sixth Avenue Elevated, he sought vainly to close the sluice gates of fear and hold his equilibrium by a self-hypnosis of arrested thought. But words of newsprint broke through this factitious barrier. The "brown hair" of the reportorial description might be the same that McCalloway had called a disputed dominion along the border land of gold and brown. The "evidences of former beauty" might be an unappreciative appraisement of _her_, badgered by misfortunes to her death. Standing at last on the curb before the undertaker's establishment, Boone had to be reminded to pay his fare, because his attention dwelt with a morbid fascination on the gilt words, "Funeral Directors and Embalmers," etched on the black plate glass of the windows. After an appreciable interval of struggle with panic, he drew himself together and went in through the open door, becoming instantly conscious of a subtle, chemical odour. From his newspaper a man in broadly patterned green and lavender shirt-sleeves lifted his eyes without rising. On the desk beside him, however, ready at notice to convert him from the liveliness of colour which in private life he fancied to the sable formality of his art, stood celluloid cuffs and a made-up tie as black and sober as his caskets. "I am an attorney," said Boone curtly. "I came to see if--" He broke off and, proffering the newspaper clipping, made a fresh beginning: "To see if I could identify her."