He then adjusted the watch-case receiver to his ear, and settled quietly down in his chair. Striking a match, he held it poised six inches away from the cigar between his teeth. For the sounder had suddenly broken out into life once more, and strange and momentous things were flashing in to him over that little thread of steel. The match burned away and fell from his fingers. He shook himself together with an effort. Then he snatched up a pencil, and with the watch-case receiver still at his ear and the Bunnell sounder still busy before him, he hurriedly wrote notes on the back of an envelope. He felt like a lean and empty wharf-rat that had tunnelled into a storehouse of unlimited provision. The very vastness of it amazed and stupefied him. He had been grubbing about for a penny or two, and here he had stumbled across a fabulous-figured banknote. Then, as item by item he was able to piece his scattered shreds of information together, his mind became clearer and his nerves grew steadier. He looked at his watch. It was twenty-six minutes past nine. As he had expected, and as had happened every night since Curry had installed the private wire in his Madison Avenue residence, the operator on the up-town end of the line switched off. The sounder grew still, like a clock that had run down. The telephone wire still carried its occasional message in to him, but he knew that he could wait no longer. It took him but a minute or two to detach his looping wire from the Curry private line. Then he threw back the switch of his telephone, concealed his transmitter, and caught up his hat and coat. Five minutes later he was careering up Fifth Avenue in a taxi-cab. A new interest, submerged in the sterner tides of life, drifted in on him as he drew nearer the Ralston and Frances Candler. He began to meditate on how much he had been missing out of existence of late, and even how empty all triumph and conquest might be, if unshared by or with another. Some vague and gently disturbing inkling of just how much a woman could become to a man, however preoccupied, crept into the quieter backgrounds of his consciousness. And with a man of his walk in life, uncompanioned, isolated, migratory, this muffling and softening element was doubly essential. He sent his card up to Frances, with an unreasonably beating heart. Word came down to him, in time, that she was engaged, but that she would see him in twenty minutes. “But I must see her, and at once!” he told the impassive clerk. It would be possible in twenty minutes, was the second message that came down to him.