He seemed bewildered with this sudden introduction into his solitude of a strange presence. His large blue eyes blinked slowly, like eyes just awakening; and though his long face presently collected a sort of courteous attention, his gaze still seemed to focus on some point remote from the present moment and place. If there was any one in the world less likely than the woman to have the certain peculiar information Carron wanted, he thought it was this individual, this long figure of a scholar, roused from meditation. All Carron's unsubstantial hopes were tottering. The man on the road appeared the merest liar, the whole thing the wildest of chases. Yet, in spite of that, he felt he was going to see it through. There was nothing that had ever happened to him that he had failed to see through. The quality in him that never released what it had once taken hold of until all was out of it, that took the last chance and found it more alluring than the first, urged him forward.
"My name is Francis Carron," he said. "There is my card. Mr. Rader, I believe?"
Rader looked a little startled with the rapidity with which the sentences were shot at him. "You came to see about the Bronson folio?" he asked doubtfully.
Carron had it in his heart to laugh when he
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