“I really want to stay about for a little,” he began deprecatingly. “I have only just come, and--perhaps you wouldn’t mind if I promise to keep away from here? I have been away a long time. All sorts of things have happened to me in the interval and also, I dare say, to the people in Farleigh I used to know. I am living and working in the Middle West. I saved up money to take a vacation and come East and look around. I don’t want people to see me but I want to try to see some of those I used to think a lot of. You will believe me, won’t you, when I say that I have no other purpose in mind?” “Of course I will,” the girl cried warmly. “Thank you. It might well look queer to you for me to be skulking about, but I simply cannot let anyone know anything about me, and yet I long above all things to find out about old friends--who is alive and--and all that. I thought it would be simple, for it is a very long time and I have changed so that I felt I was safe. But I came upon a drummer in New York who had known me only slightly and he recognised me. That took away my nerve. I couldn’t bluff now. So there’s nothing to do but to spy around nights. I can only see who’s here and who----” “If you don’t see them you won’t think they’re dead?” protested the girl. “The ones I care for would be dead if they weren’t here,” he said quietly. He said this so exactly as Dick Cartwright would have said it, that it came to Alice Lorraine that it was not unlikely that he was a relative of the dead man. He looked enough like him--or like the image in Alice’s mind which people who had known him had furnished material for--to be his brother. He wasn’t old enough to be his father nor young enough to be his son. Suppose it was really Dick Cartwright that the stranger had gone through so much to come and look up? How terribly sad to find him dead! But if that should be the case, it would, perhaps, be the kindest thing to tell him at once. As she felt for words to introduce the subject, it came to the girl that he would feel somewhat comforted to hear of her idea of a memorial. “I wonder,” she began almost eagerly, then started again quietly. “The man that built this house--the shop was built years earlier, they tell me--he was--I wonder if he was here in your day? His name was Richard Cartwright.” “O yes, I knew Cartwright,” he returned not at all enthusiastically. “You may not have heard--that he is dead?” she said softly. “I understood he was. He came to a bad end, I believe?” “A sad end,” she amended with a trace of indignation. “He was killed in a railway accident.” “But he was himself a wreck long before that, I believe,” he remarked. “However, you, being a stranger, would not have heard I suppose. If you hadn’t come to live in his house, you would never have heard of him at all and then only because it is a crazy-built house.” “It’s a charming house,” the girl declared.