date and the confirming entry of $1,500. The other papers and books were only such things as might accumulate during a lifetime on the water and in business—government certificates, manifests, boat schedules of times long gone by, and similar papers. Alan looked through the little book again and put it in his pocket. It was, beyond doubt, his father's memorandum of the sums sent to Blue Rapids for Alan; it told him that here he had been in his father's thoughts; in this little room, within a few steps from those deserted apartments of his wife, Benjamin Corvet had sent "Alan's dollar"—that dollar which had been such a subject of speculation in his childhood for himself and for all the other children. He grew warm at the thought as he began putting the other things back into the drawers.
He started and straightened suddenly; then he listened attentively, and his skin, warm an instant before, turned cold and prickled. Somewhere within the house, unmistakably on the floor below him, a door had slammed. The wind, which had grown much stronger in the last hour, was battering the windows and whining round the corners of the building; but the house was tightly closed; it could not be the wind that had blown the door shut. Some one—it was beyond question now, for the realization was quite different from the feeling he had had about that before—was in the house with him. Had his father's servant come back? That was impossible; Sherrill had received a wire from the man that day, and he could not get back to Chicago before the following morning at the earliest. But the servant, Sherrill had said, was the only other one besides his father who had a key. Was it . . . his
