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 books at all. He chose to be in this room merely because it was more sympathetic to him than any other chamber in the house. For the first time in his life, he really believed, he was experiencing an emotion quite foreign to his temperament, the emotion of unsatisfied curiosity. There was, after all, he had discovered quite unwittingly, something more in life after you had become convinced that there was nothing, another turn around a strange corner, another contingency of interest, but the apparition which had imparted this important knowledge to him had disappeared before he had been given a fair opportunity to discover wherein its special properties lay. The fellow had decamped with a couple of books, too, but Paul was not fretting over this loss. I'd give him the books, he muttered, just to have him here again.

On the whole, it seemed improbable to Paul that he would be able to gratify this desire. An interview with the furnace company which had supplied the young man had yielded barren results. O'Grady—that, apparently, was the fellow's inappropriate cognomen—had, beyond doubt, worked for the firm for ten days, giving, it appeared, almost a nimiety of satisfaction. He was, the boss informed Paul in an astonishing flow of language which seemed to spurt from Roget, a gem of the first water, a treasure, one in a thousand, a find, a nonesuch, a prodigy, and the salt of the earth. There was, indeed, no question but that he might success-