"Graustark."
But the young man shook his head slowly, Lorry's shaking in unconscious accord.
"Are you sure that you saw the young lady on board?"
"Well, rather!" exclaimed Lorry, emphatically.
"I was going to say there are a lot of Italian and German singers on the ship, and you might have been mistaken. But since you are so positive, it seems very strange that your friends are not on the list."
So Lorry went away discouraged and with a vague fear that she might have been a prima donna whose real name was Guggenslocker but whose stage name was something more euphonious. He instantly put away the thought and the fear. She was certainly not an opera singer--impossible! He drove back to his hotel, and made preparations for his return to Washington. Glancing casually over the register he came to the name that had been haunting him--Guggenslocker! There were the names, "Caspar Guggenslocker and four, Graustark." Without hesitation he began to question the clerk.
"They sailed on the Kaiser Wilhelm to-day;" said that worthy. "That's all I know about them. They came yesterday and left to-day."
Mr. Grenfall Lorry returned to Washington as in a dream--a fairy dream. The air of mystery that had grown from the first was now an impenetrable wall, the top of which his curiosity could not scale. Even his fancy, his imagination, served him not. There was but one point on which he was satisfied: he was in love. His own condition was no mystery.
Several weeks later he went to New York to question the Captain of the Wilhelm, hoping to clear away the clouds satisfactorily. To his amazement, the captain said there had been no Guggenslockers on board nor had there been persons answering the description, so far as he could tell.
Through the long hot summer he worked, and worried, and wondered. In the first, he did little that was satisfactory to himself or to his uncle; in the second, he did so much that he was advised by his physician to take a rest; in the last, he indulged himself so extensively that it had become unbearable. He must know all about her? But how?
The early months of autumn found him pale and tired and indifferent alike to work and play. Ha found no pleasure in the society that had known him as a lion. Women bored him; men annoyed him; the play suffocated him; the tiresome club was ruining his temper; the whole world was going wrong. The doctor told him he was approaching nervous prostration; his mother's anxious eyes could no longer be denied, so he realized grimly that there was but one course left open to him.