"He forgot my birthday, two weeks ago," she said. "It was the first one he had ever forgotten, in nineteen of them."

Nineteen! Nineteen from thirty-five leaves sixteen!

"What I meant was this," I explained. "People sometimes have sudden and unaccountable lapses of memory and at those times they are apt to stray away from home. Has your father been worried lately?"

"He has not been himself at all. He has been irritable, even to me, and terrible to the servants. Only to Carter—he was never ugly to Carter. But I do not think it was a lapse of memory. When I remember how he looked that morning, I believe that he meant then to go away. It shows how he had changed, when he could think of going away without a word, and leaving me there alone."

"Then you have no brothers or sisters?"

"None. I came to you—" there she stopped.

"Please tell me how you happened to come to me," I urged. "I think you know that I am both honored and pleased."

"I didn't know where to go," she confessed, "so I took the telephone directory, the classified part under 'Attorneys,' and after I shut my eyes, I put my finger haphazard on the page. It pointed to your name."

I am afraid I flushed at this, but it was a wholesome douche. In a moment I laughed.

"We will take it as an omen," I said, "and I will do all that I can. But I am not a detective, Miss Fleming. Don't you think we ought to have one?"

"Not the police!" she shuddered. "I thought you could do something without calling in a detective."

"Suppose you tell me what happened the day your father left, and how he went away. Tell me the little things too. They may be straws that will point in a certain direction."

"In the first place," she began, "we live on Monmouth Avenue. There are just the two of us, and the servants: a cook, two housemaids, a laundress, a butler and a chauffeur. My father spends much of his time at the capital, and in the last two years, since my old governess went back to Germany, at those times I usually go to mother's sisters at Bellwood—Miss Letitia and Miss Jane Maitland."

I nodded: I knew the Maitland ladies well. I had drawn four different wills for Miss Letitia in the last year.

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