to-day that name, Alan Conrad, came to me in quite another way, in a way which makes it certain that it is closely connected with whatever has happened to Uncle Benny. You are quite sure you never heard him mention it, dear?" 

 "Quite sure, father." 

 He released her and, still in his hat and coat, went swiftly up the stairs. She ran after him and found him standing before a highboy in his dressing room. He unlocked a drawer in the highboy, and from within the drawer he took a key. Then, still disregarding her, he hurried back down-stairs. 

 As she followed him, she caught up a wrap and pulled it around her. He had told the motor, she realized now, to wait; but as he reached the door, he turned and stopped her. 

 "I would rather you did not come with me, little daughter. I do not know at all what it is that has happened—I will let you know as soon as I find out." 

 The finality in his tone stopped her from argument. As the house door and then the door of the limousine closed after him, she went back toward the window, slowly taking off the wrap. She saw the motor shoot swiftly out upon the drive, turn northward in the way that it had come, and then turn again, and disappear. She could only stand and watch for it to come back and listen for the 'phone; for the moment she found it difficult to think. Something had happened to Uncle Benny, something terrible, dreadful for those who loved him; that was plain, though only the fact and not its nature was known to her or to her father; and that something was connected—intimately connected, her father had said—with a name which no one who knew Uncle Benny, ever had heard before, with the name of Alan Conrad of Blue Rapids, Kansas. Who was this Alan Conrad, and what could his connection be with Uncle Benny so to precipitate disaster upon him? 

 

 

 CHAPTER II 

 WHO IS ALAN CONRAD? 

 The recipient of the letter which Benjamin Corvet had written and later so excitedly attempted to recover, was asking himself a question which was almost the same as the question which Constance Sherrill had asked. He was, the second morning later, waiting for the first of the two daily eastbound trains which stopped at the little Kansas town of Blue Rapids which he called home. As long as he could look back into his life, the question, who is this person they 

 Prev. P 13/252 next