Page:Top-Notch Magazine, May 1 1915 (IA tn 1915 05 01).pdf/82

 The sentence ended with a bump, as Cuthbert Edwards slammed his receiver back upon its hook. The psychologist, who would have recognized the name—even if not forewarned by the communication he had received that morning—as the conservative head of one of the oldest and most "exclusive" families of New England Puritan extraction, detached the sphygmograph from his wrist and drew toward him and reread the fantastic advertisement that had come to him inclosed in Winton Edwards' letter. Apparently it had been cut from the classified columns of one of the big dailies:

The letter, to the first page of which the advertisement had been pinned, was dated the same day he had received it, postmarked three o'clock that morning, and written in the scrawling hand of a young man under strong emotion:

The psychologist had hardly finished this letter, when rapid footsteps in the corridor outside stopped at his office door. Never had there been a more striking entrance into Trant's office than that of the young man who now burst in—disheveled, wet with the rain, his eyes red for want of sleep.

"She has left me, Mr. Trant!" he cried, with no prelude. "She has gone!"

As he sank dazedly into a chair, he pulled from his pocket a small leather case and handed it to the psychologist. Within was the photograph of a remarkably handsome girl in her early twenties—a girl sobered by some unusual experience, as showed most plainly in the poise of her little round head wrapped with its braid of lustrous hair, and the shadow that lurked in the steadfast eyes, though they were smiling, and the full lips were smiling, too.

"You are, I suppose, Mr. Winton Edwards," said Trant, picking up the letter on his desk. "Now, if you have come to me for help, Mr. Edwards, you must first give me all the information of the case that you have."

"That is Eva Silber," young Edwards replied. "Miss Silber had been employed by us a little over a year. She came to us in answer to an advertisement. She gave us no information in regard to herself when she came, and she has given none since. Because of her marked ability my father put her in complete charge of the house's correspondence with our foreign agents; for in addition to English, she speaks and writes fluently German, French, the Magyar dialect of Hungary, Russian, and Spanish.

"I was in love with her almost from the first," he went on, "in spite of my father's objection to the attachment. The first Edwards of our family, Mr. Trant, came to Massachusetts in 1660. So my father has the idea that anybody who came later cannot possibly be our equal; and Miss Silber, who came to