“Dr. Cavanaugh speaking.”

  “Dr. Cavanaugh, this is Don Ellsworth. I wondered—may I come and talk to you?” The voice at the other end of the wire was embarrassed and yet urgent, speaking rapidly but with hesitations—the voice of a man who has held an impulse in check, only to act on it suddenly in the end.

  Dr. Cavanaugh reached out for the nickel and restored it to his trousers pocket. Then he leafed rapidly through the pages of the memorandum calendar that stood close to the telephone on the desk.

  “Certainly. I’m rather full up for the balance of the week. Say Friday—at four?”

  Dr. Cavanaugh viewed the mouthpiece of the telephone with a faint smile as he made this test of Ellsworth’s patience. From what he knew of Don Ellsworth, Friday at four would not suit him at all. But he did not permit a trace of that smile to colour his tone.

  “But—I simply can’t wait till Friday.” The voice was more sure of itself now. If the speaker had reached his decision to call Dr. Cavanaugh against inner opposition, his impulse, when baulked from without, had gained singleness and strength. “It’s urgent. Haven’t you read the papers?”

  “Only casually.”

  “It’s about Sheila. I tell you, Doctor, I’m almost wild. I’m at the end of my rope. Couldn’t I come over now—to-night?”

  Dr. Cavanaugh glanced mournfully around the room, its outlines faintly blurred in the gray haze of tobacco smoke. The student lamp which he had brought from Germany in his university days and preferred to electricity as a reading light beamed mellowly down on the comfortably dented pillows of the chaise longue, on the sober gray-and-black covers of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology. He had had a hard day, delving persistently, delicately, indefatigably into the dark recesses of the mind of a patient afflicted with hysterical blindness. A hard and baffling day, with nothing to show for it in the way of results—yet.

  “The surgeon of the mind—an operation that takes a year—and the need of as steady a hand as if one were extracting a bullet from the heart muscle,” he mused as his gaze briefly circled the room.

  His thick shoulders heaved slightly in an inaudible sigh. But it was characteristic that, once he had made his decision, he made no play of regret. He had scant patience with the form of self-aggrandizement which in granting a favour makes the recipient uncomfortable.

  “All right, Don. Come along.” The calm friendliness of his voice carried no hint of his relinquished evening’s rest.

  “I hate to impose on you like this. But Sheila——”

  “If I hadn’t been willing to see you, I’d have said so. I’ll expect you in fifteen minutes.”

  And for fifteen minutes Dr. Cavanaugh was lost to the world, deep in an article on focal infection as a factor in dementia præcox.

  Except for the outside entrance and separate doorbell, the room had none of the stigmata of a doctor’s office. It was furnished as a library, and the books which covered two walls with a mosaic of warm, variegated colour were by no means exclusively technical. The half-dozen pictures that marched in line above the bare tops of the bookcases were noncommittal etchings—only the student versed in this somewhat austere art would have recognized these gray and white crisscrossed lines of ships and harbours and fragmentary streets as extremely valuable and, an artist would add, beautiful possessions. The chaise longue and the easy chairs were not too imposing to be comfortable. The only professional note on the wide desk with its worn green leather fittings was the unavoidable calendar pad—and even this was fitted with a cover and was usually kept closed.

  But, for the matter of that, Dr. Cavanaugh was not an ordinary doctor. For his own purposes the room was as carefully equipped as an operating theatre for a surgeon. Besides, though unobtrusively, it expressed his own tastes, and Dr. Cavanaugh had reached a professional eminence which relieved him of the necessity of impressing patients. His treatments were as expensive and as hard to obtain as Freud’s—and, he occasionally admitted with a humorous squint in his brown eyes which absolved the remark of conceit, being without Freud’s single-minded genius, they were sometimes more successful.

  He had now, in the late forties, reached the point where he could afford to take only the cases which interested him. Those cases were as likely as not to be undertaken for no fee at all—to be written up later in one of those terse, stylistic monographs which brought a blaze of light into the dark thickets of bejargoned medical journals. They were also likely to bring him into court as the last resort alienist of a harassed district attorney or a psychopathic millionaire. They had even brought him into the Sunday supplements and the front pages of metropolitan newspapers, where headline writers had been known to refer to him as the “criminal psychologist” and feature writers credited him with an astounding wizardry.

  His solution of the Barnes-Hill double murder, three years after the police had given it up, had extended his reputation to the laity and had made his massive figure and his leonine head with its heavy features and surprisingly gentle brown eyes fair game for the cartoonist. What the laity could scarcely appreciate—although the chief of police did—was the skill with which he had contrived to put the explanation of that tortuous cats’ cradle of facts into the hands of the authorities without making them appear to have been fools.

  “I am not a criminologist,” he always insisted. “The study of human motives has been my professional concern for a good many years. What I’ve picked up on the side is just a hobby—a hobby that happens to fit in with my professional interests. Clues? Well, we can’t afford to ignore clues, though I’m no expert in that line. But the most revealing clues cannot be put under the microscope—they are in the workings of the human mind.”

  The cries of the newsboy had died away down the street when footsteps sounded on the flagged path leading around the side of the house to the office entrance. Dr. Cavanaugh rose and opened the door before the young man on the stoop had lifted his hand to the bell.

  “Come in, Don. Take off your coat and have a cigar.”

  “This is awfully good of you, Doctor. There’s nobody else home?”

  “Barbara is out for the evening. She will be sorry to have missed you. But if you wanted to talk to me professionally, it’s probably just as well.”

  “Yes—I——” The broken sentence died out in a mumble as Ellsworth turned to lay his coat and hat across the back of a chair.

  Don Ellsworth’s face, as he turned to the light, was a curious blend of anxiety, embarrassment, and the habitual self-assurance of one for whom money was accustomed to make all rough places smooth. The anxiety and the self-assurance remained, but it was impossible for embarrassment to linger in the impersonal, widely tolerant presence of Dr. Cavanaugh.

  Don found himself relaxing in the encompassing arms of the chair and facing the older man with the relief of a child in a scrape who has found an understanding elder to whom to pour out his difficulties. A good part of Don’s life, smothered in wealth since he first became known as the “millionaire baby,” had been spent in getting into and out of scrapes, but they had all been in the tradition of such misdemeanours. The present situation found him without a code to direct him which way to turn.

  “You read about Sheila—that she’s gone? She disappeared a week ago without a trace. I’ve got to find out what has become of her!”

  “A week ago,” Dr. Cavanaugh said meditatively, clipping the end of his cigar and pushing the smoking stand nearer his visitor. “And the newspapers—which, I suppose, implies also the police—have known it for three days. Isn’t your agitation a trifle—retarded?”

  Chapter II

  “I WISH to heaven the police could have been kept out of it altogether!” Don’s heavy black brows drew together in a frown. He looked at the moment like a baulked and sulky boy.

  “Indeed?” The doctor’s voice barely rose to make the noncommittal word a question. He learned more from his patients by letting them talk than by quizzing them; and by applying the same technic to the normal, or even the criminal, mind, he had listened to some remarkable confessions unattainable by “third-degree” methods.

  He waited, in a silence which lapped the room.

  “I should have come to you in the first place!” Don burst out at last, tapping his cigar nervously against the ash tray. “Only—well, it’s all such a mess. I hoped it could be covered up. I might have known! It’s rather a difficult matter to discuss.”

  “Take your time.” Dr. Cavanaugh settled back in his chair with the air of a man who does not even have to be patient.

  The effect of this advice was to plunge his visitor into hurried speech.

  “It was a week ago—a week ago last night, to be exact. Dinner was as usual. We always kept up a good front, you know. And Sheila rather enjoyed playing the young matron. It was a new rôle for her—her other marriages, she said, had lacked the brownstone atmosphere. She was in high spirits, as usual. Even when we were alone, she never admitted by word or manner that——Oh, well!” Ellsworth hesitated, and then went on, leaving the sentence unfinished.

  “Anyway, I’m sure that she wasn’t worried or apprehensive or particularly excited about anything. Sheila isn’t the worrying type, and as for apprehension—if she thought there was anything for her to be afraid of, she’d clap her hands together in that way she has, and go after it as a new thrill. But there was absolutely no sign of anything in the wind. I remarked when we had had our coffee that I was going around to the club—though, as a matter of fact, I didn’t go, after all. I just took a long drive all by myself into the country, thinking about—things. When I left the house she was on her way upstairs; she said she was going to bed early and get a good night’s sleep.

  “That is the last I’ve seen of her. She left all the lights burning in her boudoir—they were still burning next morning. She didn’t take anything with her, not even a suitcase. In the morning she just—wasn’t there. You know Sheila, of course?”

  The doctor had listened without interrupting Don’s recital by so much as a nod or a gesture.

  “Not very well, unfortunately,” he answered easily. “We haven’t seen much of you since your marriage, you know.”

  “No,” Don said abruptly, and stopped.

  “It was a mistake to be ashamed of your marriage,” Dr. Cavanaugh observed impersonally. “It is always a mistake to be ashamed. It creates unnecessary difficulties. What you do, you do. Either don’t do it, or stand by it. You always must go on from where you are, you know—not back.”

  “I did stand by it, didn’t I? God knows——” The young man’s voice was harsh with feeling.

  “Mrs. Ellsworth left, and you want me to find her?” The older man prompted imperturbably.

  “I want anything rather than all this blare—the very thing I’d give my eye teeth to avoid.”

  “You were not the one to report that your wife was missing, then?”

  “I certainly wasn’t. If you knew Sheila——”

  “I saw her several times before she left the stage—and of course, as you know, we’ve met casually once or twice since. But that’s an insufficient basis for determining what she would do.”

  “She’s charming, of course—terribly charming.” The savage tone robbed the words of all compliment. “She’s—vital. When she wants a thing she simply gets it. And scandal means absolutely nothing to her. It isn’t in her world. She wouldn’t so much as laugh at it—she’d ignore it. It’s been an asset to her, not a liability. She might go like that simply because she knows that there’s nothing I could—or would be willing to—do about it. She might do anything!”

  “Oh, no!” the doctor protested. “The number of things a given person might do is strictly limited—by that person. But in this case there’s someone else involved. If you didn’t report her disappearance, who did?”

  “Mrs. Kane.” Don’s animosity toward Mrs. Kane was patent.

  “Mrs. Kane?”

  “She was Sheila’s dresser, I think they call it. A hard-boiled old customer. When Sheila left the stage—when we were married”—his lips twisted wryly on the word—“she brought Mrs. Kane with her as a personal maid. She doesn’t fit in at all with the rest of the staff. Her manners are atrocious. She’s always resented me.”

  “Perhaps your manner to her was not exactly placating.”

  Don swept the comment aside with an impatient wave of his cigar.

  “I don’t know why Sheila kept her. She’s not the devoted-old-retainer type at all. I’ve heard her speak to Sheila in a way that would cost any proper servant her place at once. Impudent and surly. It was she who found the lights burning in Sheila’s boudoir the next morning. She had the nerve to come and ask me where ‘Miss O’Shay’ was. Nothing on earth could keep her from calling Sheila ‘Miss O’Shay.’ She knows I don’t like it.” Despite the anxiety that wrinkled his forehead, Don’s injured tone was comically that of a spoiled child who is not used to having people do what he doesn’t like.

  The briefest of smiles hovered at the corners of Dr. Cavanaugh’s lips, and was gone.

  “And then?” The calm voice was like a guiding hand, leading Don back from his disgruntled consideration of the failings of Mrs. Kane.

  “Of course, when I found she had gone like that, I was upset. And Mrs. Kane kept after me about it. I—I’m afraid I lost my temper.” Don flushed uneasily. Those who knew him at all well knew of the futile rages which seized him, often over trivial matters, and seemed so childish in retrospect.

  Dr. Cavanaugh glanced at him obliquely under cover of applying a match to a fresh cigar. The child who destroys his toys—and afterward cries to have them returned to him. The worst thing that could have happened to the millionaire baby was that his broken toys always had been restored, or replaced.

  “Were you angry with Mrs. Ellsworth for leaving—or with Mrs. Kane for breaking the news to you, let us say, untactfully?”

  “I don’t know—both, I guess,” Don floundered. “To tell the truth, I thought she might have done it just to create a stir. She loved to be the centre of a sensation—it had been her life for so long. It might have been a sudden impulse, the idea that she could plague me into making a search for her, and then show up, laughing, with some fresh newspaper clippings to add to her collection. I wouldn’t even be surprised if this Kane woman knew a good deal more about it than she is telling to me or to anyone!”

  Chapter III

  “YOU MUST remember that your distrust of Mrs. Kane may be founded on nothing more objective than your personal dislike for her,” the doctor suggested. “You’re not much given to discounting your judgments in the light of your emotions, are you?”

  Don accepted the mildly voiced criticism with sulky dignity.

  “I should hardly say that my wife’s maid was important enough for personal dislike,” he said.

  “She may be very important, indeed, for all we know. At any rate, if her object was to rouse you to a display of wrath, she evidently succeeded. Can you recall exactly what you said to her? I don’t mean to be hard on you—your reaction was doubtless quite normal.” This time the doctor’s smile was definite, even genial. “Whatever it was, I’ve in all probability heard a good many worse things. And I don’t regard it as my job to indulge in moral judgments on my fellows. The most I’m likely to say to you is that you were unwise.”

  “Well, I—I finally told her I didn’t give a damn! She turned her back and left; and the next thing I knew, the police were ringing the front doorbell and asking impertinent questions. I told them as little as I could.” There was a grim satisfaction under Don’s harassment.

  “And did you?” the doctor asked.

  Don looked up from a moody contemplation of his shoe.

  “Did I what?”

  “Give a damn.”

  The young man leaped to his feet, his hands furiously clenching and unclenching at his sides.

  “Look here, you can’t——” he began, choking.

  Dr. Cavanaugh did not move a muscle from his relaxed position in the big chair.

  “Never mind,” he said quietly. “I apologize. It was your own statement, you know. Now what, precisely, do you want me to do in the matter?”

  “I want you to get me out of it with a minimum of publicity. Everything I’ve ever done—and it hasn’t been much—has been taken up by the papers. If I got lit after a football game at college, or took a chorus girl to dinner, it was spread all over the country. I can’t stand any more of it. I can’t, and I won’t. Just because I happen to have money, my wife can’t even leave me without their getting out extras about it.”

  “If she did leave you,” Dr. Cavanaugh amended, so low that he might have been only thinking aloud.

  “But——” Don’s face was a study in angry bewilderment.

  “There are other possibilities. I doubt, in fact, if the one you have mentioned would be the first to occur to most men in your position.”

  “Well, she couldn’t very well be kidnapped from her own boudoir, in a house full of servants. And by the same token, she couldn’t have met with an accident, or have been held up by bandits, without leaving a trace. I did not mean to speak harshly of her just now, when I said she might have vanished just to plague me. She wouldn’t set out deliberately to hurt anyone—she merely wouldn’t notice whether they were hurt or not, if they got in her way. And you must remember that Sheila was used to the most complete freedom of action. She wasn’t the sort of person you could put in a bottle and keep there. Suppose she turned up in a week or two and announced that she had merely gone away to pay a sudden visit and that it was purely her own affair, not that of the police. A pretty fool I’d look!”