who had been long with them feared for her sanity, but, loving “Mr. James” as they did, sympathized with her morbidness.  So, in the old farmhouse, it was as though Jimmie still stamped through the halls, or from his room, as he dressed, whistled merrily.  In the kennels the hounds howled dismally, in the stables at each footstep the ponies stamped with impatience, on the terrace his house dog, Huang Su, lay with his eyes fixed upon the road waiting for the return of the master, and in the gardens a girl in black, wasted and white-faced, walked alone and rebelled that she was still alive.

After six weeks, when the ship re-entered New York harbor, Jimmie, his beard having grown, and wearing gold-rimmed spectacles, walked boldly down the gangplank.  His confidence was not misplaced.  The polo-player, clean-faced, lean, and fit, had disappeared.  Six weeks of German cooking, a German barber, and the spectacles had produced a graduate of Heidelberg.

At a furnished room on a side street Jimmie left his baggage, and at once at the public library, in the back numbers of the daily papers, read the accounts of his death and interviews with his friends.  They all agreed the reason for his suicide was his fear of approaching blindness.  As he read, Jimmie became deeply depressed.  Any sneaking hopes he might have held that he was not dead were now destroyed.  The evidence of his friends was enough to convince any one.  It convinced him.  Now that it was too late, his act of self-sacrifice appeared supremely stupid and ridiculous.  Bitterly he attacked himself as a bungler and an ass.  He assured himself he should have made a fight for it; should have fought for his wife:  and against Maddox.  Instead of which he weakly had effaced himself, had surrendered his rights, had abandoned his wife at a time when most was required of him.  He tortured himself by thinking that probably at that very moment she was in need of his help.  And at that very moment head-lines in the paper he was searching proved this was true.

“BLAGWIN’S LOST WILL,” he read.  “DETECTIVES RELINQUISH SEARCH!  REWARD OF TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS FAILS TO BRING CLEW!”

Jimmie raced through the back numbers.  They told him his will, in which he had left everything to Jeanne, could not be found; that in consequence, except her widow’s third, all of his real estate, which was the bulk of his property, would now go to two distant cousins who already possessed more than was good for them, and who in Paris were leading lives of elegant wastefulness.  The will had been signed the week before his wedding-day, but the lawyer who had drawn it was dead, and the witnesses, two servants, had long since quit Jimmie’s service and could not be found.  It was known Jimmie kept the will in the safe at his country house, but from the safe it had disappeared.