"Your son, Spencer—your son, Spencer— has disappeared—has disappeared—and not been heard of for three days."

It was his disturbed iufnd now that was unhappily rehearsing the sinister suggestion, and the difference between those.silent,' im palpable utterances, that spoke,to' the brain without troubling the ear, and the clear, hissing syllables that had waked hlin, made McHenry miserably certain of the reality of the latter. His was the man's" affection—• latent rather than active, waiting some such shock as this to a_sert itself. Amother probably would not havo let her only son leave home with a dozen college companions, for an extended European tour; or, letting him go, would have thought of him daily and hourly, 'instead of permitting huh. to almost slip her niind, as McHenry had done through the past few busy weeks. But— great heavens! a man might be pardoned for feeling upset over a horrid hint, con veyed in this uncanny fashion, that some mysterious danger overhung his boy! Even if a dream, it was scarcely a soothing one. "What on earth did we eat last night?" thought McHenry, to whom indigestion was a word without meaning. Plainly, here was no clue; besides the fact that _is stomach was Welsh-rabbit-proof, they had had the simplest of fare, for the sake of Heller, who was a suffering dyspeptic, eternally on diet; and for the sake of Ward, his other guest, who was an aggressive teetotaler, tne cork of so much as a beer bottle had not been popped. In addition, they had not once mentioned Spencer; he was not sure that Ward even knew he had a son.
