"Your telegram did not take me wholly by surprise," he said. "I knew that Nancy--you don't mind if I use her name in that way, do you? Well, then, I had heard of her return. Mrs. Van Ralten rang me up to say that Mr. Willard and his daughter had arrived by the steamer in the early morning. I think I took such astounding news calmly enough; but I have a suspicion that the good lady herself was a trifle worried, and was only too glad to have the chance of announcing the fact of her friend's reappearance. She added that Nancy was ill, having been overcome by the terrific heat in New York, and I chimed in with the proper sentiments; though I have seldom been more bewildered than at that moment. Soon afterward your message came, and I began dimly to grasp the position. I seized the pretext of Mrs. Van Ralten's statement to call up Nancy's residence, and, by some sort of fortune, whether good or bad I can't determine, she herself answered. I concocted a suitable excuse; but she solved the difficulty at once by saying that, as your friend, I ought to know the facts. She had resolved to leave you, 'to put an end to a mad dream' was a phrase she used, and asked me to tell you that she adhered resolutely to the decision she had announced in a letter the previous day. She added that she was sailing in a steamer from Boston with her father that night, and hoped I would spread the impression that she had been ill, and needed a sea voyage. I can assure you, old chap, I was completely flabbergasted. Admiring her as I do, I would never have believed that she would act in that extraordinary manner had I not received the story from her own lips, if one may so describe a conversation by telephone. I was so horribly afraid lest some outsider in the hotel might overhear me that I dared not question her. The talk was studiously formal on her part, and I was so thoroughly cut up that I could not attempt to convey my impressions in your telegram. Moreover, as a diligent student of Shakespeare, was I not warned that 'Though it be honest, it is never good To bring bad news.' Certainly, I was not quite in the position of Cleopatra's messenger, since I could only confirm a disaster already known to you; but I literally shrank from the obvious inferences. Then came MacGonigal's revelation of events here. I simply couldn't rest. After a miserable twenty-four hours of vacillation, I started for New York, calling at your hotel to make sure you had gone west. One thing more. A Chicago newspaper gave a list of passengers sailing from Boston in a Red Star liner. In it were the names of Nancy and her father." For an appreciable time after Dacre had concluded neither man spoke. Then Power said quietly: "Thus endeth the second lesson."