“Yes.” “Who with?” “This man’s brother.” “How long ago?” “Three months, about.” “And you have never seen her since?” “No.” “Nor him?” “No.” “And don’t know where they lived?” “No--or I shouldn’t be here.” The inspector caressed his short red beard, looked thoughtfully again at the letter a moment or two, placed it gently on the desk and leaned forward. “You’d better take a man and hunt up the waterside. She hasn’t come ashore here.” “You think she means it?” “I think--yes; you’d better go and look.” “By water, I mean?” “Yes--by water. That’s my opinion.” He called to one of the seated men and gave him certain directions. A minute later we were all three in the street outside. What happened or whither we went during that long night remains only in my memory the ghastly shadow of a dream. I can recall the white plate of the moon, and still the icy wind and the spectral march onward. This seemed the fitting outcome of our monotonous weeks of wandering--this aimless corpse-search on the part of two passionate fools who had failed in their pursuit of the living woman. To my sick fancy it seemed the monstrous parody of chase--an objectless struggle toward a goal that shifted with every step toward any determined point. Still we never stopped, but flitted hopelessly from station to station, only to find ourselves baffled and urged forward afresh. I became familiar with rooms such as that we had left--rooms varying slightly in detail, but all furnished to the same pattern. Grewsomer places knew us, too--hideous cellars for the dead, where clothes were lifted from stiff yellow faces and from limbs stuck out in distorted burlesque of the rest that is called everlasting. Once, I remember, it came upon us with a quivering shock that our mission was fulfilled; a body had been brought in--I forget where--the body of a young woman. But when we came to view it it was not that that we sought. Pitiful heaven, was our tragedy, then, but a common fashion of the dreadful waterway we groped our passage along? How was it possible in all that harvest of death to find the one awn for our particular gleaning? But here--though I was little conscious of it at the time--an impression took life in me that was to bear strange fruit by and by. Dawn was in the air, menacing, most chill and gloomy, when we came out once more upon the riverside at a point where an old rotting bridge of timber sprawled across the stream like a wrecked dam. All its neighborhood seemed waste ground or lonely deserted tenements standing black and crookedly against a wan sweep of sky. In the moment of our issuing, as if it were a smaller splinter detached from the wreck, a little boat glided out from under the bridge and made for a flight of dank and spongy steps that led up from the water not ten yards from where we stood.