“No, I did not.”

“I beg your pardon, then, for anticipating you,” said the Tracer carelessly.

“Anticipating? How do you know it is not a man I am in search of?” demanded Harren.

“Captain Harren, you are unmarried and have no son; you have no father, no brother, no sister.  Therefore I infer—­several things—­for example, that you are in love.”

“I?  In love?”

“Desperately, Captain.”

“Your inferences seem to satisfy you, at least,” said Harren almost sullenly, “but they don’t satisfy me—­clever as they appear to be.”

“Exactly.  Then you are not in love?”

“I don’t know whether I am or not.”

“I do,” said the Tracer of Lost Persons.

“Then you know more than I,” retorted Harren sharply.

“But that is my business—­to know more than you do,” returned Mr. Keen patiently.  “Else why are you here to consult me?” And as Harren made no reply:  “I have seen thousands and thousands of people in love.  I have reduced the superficial muscular phenomena and facial symptomatic aspect of such people to an exact science founded upon a schedule approximating the Bertillon system of records.  And,” he added, smiling, “out of the twenty-seven known vocal variations your voice betrays twenty-five unmistakable symptoms; and out of the sixteen reflex muscular symptoms your face has furnished six, your hands three, your limbs and feet six.  Then there are other superficial symptoms—­”

“Good heavens!” broke in Harren; “how can you prove a man to be in love when he himself doesn’t know whether he is or not?  If a man isn’t in love no Bertillon system can make him so; and if a man doesn’t know whether or not he is in love, who can tell him the truth?”

“I can,” said the Tracer calmly.

“What!  When I tell you I myself don’t know?”

“That,” said the Tracer, smiling, “is the final and convincing symptom. You don’t know. I know because you don’t know.  That is the easiest way to be sure that you are in love, Captain Harren, because you always are when you are not sure.  You’d know if you were not in love.  Now, my dear sir, you may lay your case confidently before me.”

Harren, unconvinced, sat frowning and biting his lip and twisting his short, crisp mustache which the tropical sun had turned straw color and curly.

“I feel like a fool to tell you,” he said.  “I’m not an imaginative man, Mr. Keen; I’m not fanciful, not sentimental.  I’m perfectly healthy, perfectly normal—­a very busy man in my profession, with no time and no inclination to fall in love.”

“Just the sort of man who does it,” commented Keen.  “Continue.”

Harren fidgeted about in his chair, looked out of the window, squinted at the ceiling, then straightened up, folding his arms with sudden determination.

“I’d rather be boloed than tell you,” he said.  “Perhaps, after all, I am a lunatic; perhaps I’ve had a touch of the Luzon sun and don’t know it.”