CHAPTER IV
"ARRIVED SAFE; WELL"
AS the door closed behind Sherrill, Alan went over to the dresser and picked up the key which Sherrill had left. It was, he saw, a flat key of a sort common twenty years before, not of the more recent corrugated shape. As he looked at it and then away from it, thoughtfully turning it over and over in his fingers, it brought no sense of possession to him. Sherrill had said the house was his, had been given him by his father; but that fact could not actually make it his in his realization. He could not imagine himself owning such a house or what he would do with it if it were his. He put the key, after a moment, on the ring with two or three other keys he had, and dropped them into his pocket; then he crossed to a chair and sat down.
He found, as he tried now to disentangle the events of the afternoon, that from them, and especially from his last interview with Sherrill, two facts stood out most clearly. The first of these related more directly to his father—to Benjamin Corvet. When such a man as Benjamin Corvet must have been, disappears—when, without warning and without leaving any account of himself he vanishes from among those who knew him—the persons most closely interested pass through three stages of anxiety. They doubt first whether the disappearance is real and whether inquiry on their part
