"Jim," he said, "where did you live when you lived in New York?"

"In Eighty-seventh Street."

"West?"

"Yes, sir."

"Do you remember the house--the number?"

"No, sir."

"Was it a private house?"

"I don't know. It was very tall. We lived on one floor and used an
elevator."

"I see. It was an apartment house."

The boy stood, with blonde head lowered, silently turning over the
leaves of an old magazine.

Marche walked out to the porch; his brows were bent slightly inward, and
he bit the end of his unlighted cigarette until the thing became
useless. Then he flung it away. A few stars watched him above the black
ramparts of the pines; a gentle wind was abroad, bringing inland the
restless voice of the sea.

In Marche's mind a persistent thought was groping in darkness, vainly
striving to touch and awaken memories of things forgotten. What was it
he was trying to remember? What manner of episode, and how connected
with this place, with the boy's book, with the portrait of his mother in
its oval frame? Had he seen that portrait before? Perhaps he had seen it
here, five years ago; yet that could not be, because Herold had not been
here then.

Was it the writing on the flyleaf that had stirred some forgotten
memory? It had seemed to him familiar, somehow--yet not like the
handwriting in Herold's business letters to him. Yet it was Herold's
writing--"Jim, from Daddy"--that was the inscription. And that
inscription had riveted his attention from the first moment he saw it.