“Quite impossible,” Cuthbert Edwards asserted. “Miss Silber lived in a little house west of Ravenswood. There are very few houses, none within at least a quarter of a mile of her. The ground is flat, and no one could have got away without being seen by me.”

“Your story so far is certainly very peculiar,” the psychologist commented, “and it gains interest with every detail. Are you certain it was not this second interview with your father”—he turned again to the younger man—“that made Miss Silber refuse you?”

“No; it was not. When I got back yesterday and learned from father what had happened, I went out at once to Eva at her home. She had changed utterly; not in her feelings toward me, for I felt certain even then that she loved me—but an influence—the influence of this man—had come between us. She told me there was no longer any chance of her marrying. She refused the explanation she had promised to make to me. She told me to go away and forget her, or—as I wrote you—to think of her as dead.

“You can imagine my feelings,” he went on. “I could not sleep last night after I had left her. As I was wandering about the house, I saw the evening paper lying spread out on the library table and my eye caught her name in it. It was in the advertisement that I sent you, Mr. Trant. Late as it was, I called up the newspaper offices and learned the facts regarding its insertion. At daybreak I motored out to see Eva. The house was empty. I went round it in the mud and rain, peering in at the windows. Even the housekeeper was no longer there, and the neighbors could tell me nothing of the time or manner of their leaving; nor has any word come from her to the office.”

“That is all, then,” the psychologist said thoughtfully. “‘The seventeenth of the tenth’” he reread the beginning of the advertisement. “That is, of course, a date, the seventeenth of the tenth month, and it is put there to recall to Miss Silber some event of which it would be sure to remind her. I suppose you know of no private significance this date might have for her, or you would have mentioned it.”

“None on the seventeenth; no, Mr. Trant,” young Edwards replied. “If it were only the thirtieth I might help you; for I know that on that date Eva celebrates some sort of anniversary at home.”

Trant opened a bulky almanac lying on his desk, and as he glanced swiftly down the page his eyes flashed suddenly with comprehension.

“You are correct, I think, as to the 

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