“How can you help me?” he said bluntly, while the quivering undertone rang in spite of him.  “Yes, I am in love; but how can any living man help me?”

“Are you in love with the dead?” asked the Tracer gravely.  “For that only is hopeless.  Are you in love with one who is not living?”

“Yes.”

“You love one whom you know to be dead?”

“Yes; dead.”

“How do you know that she is dead?”

“That is not the question.  I knew that when I fell in love with her.  It is not that which appals me; I ask nothing more than to live my life out loving the dead.  I—­I ask very little.”

He passed his unsteady hand across his dry lips, across his eyes and forehead, then laid his clinched fist on the table.

“Some men remain constant to a memory; some to a picture—­sane, wholesome, normal men.  Some men, with a fixed ideal, never encounter its facsimile, and so never love.  There is nothing strange, after all, in this; nothing abnormal, nothing unwholesome.  Gruenwald loved the marble head and shoulders of the lovely Amazon in the Munich Museum; he died unmarried, leaving the charities and good deeds of a blameless life to justify him.  Sir Henry Guest, the great surgeon who worked among the poor without recompense, loved Gainsborough’s ‘Lady Wilton.’  The portrait hangs above his tomb in St. Clement’s Hundreds.  D’Epernay loved Mlle. Jeanne Vacaresco, who died before he was born.  And I—­I love in my own fashion.”

His low voice rang with the repressed undertone of excitement; he opened and closed his clinched hand as though controlling the lever of his emotions.

“What can you do for a man who loves the shadow of Life?” he asked.

“If you love the shadow because the substance has passed away—­if you love the soul because the dust has returned to the earth as it was—­”

“It has not!” said the younger man.

The Tracer said very gravely:  “It is written that whenever ’the Silver Cord’ is loosed, ’then shall the dust return unto the earth as it was, and the spirit shall return unto Him who gave it.’”

“The spirit—­yes; that has taken its splendid flight—­”

His voice choked up, died out; he strove to speak again, but could not.  The Tracer let him alone, and bent again over his desk, drawing imaginary circles on the stained blotter, while moment after moment passed under the tension of that fiercest of all struggles, when a man sits throttling his own soul into silence.

And, after a long time, Burke lifted a haggard face from the cradle of his crossed arms and shook his shoulders, drawing a deep, steady breath.

“Listen to me!” he said in an altered voice.

And the Tracer of Lost Persons nodded.

CHAPTER XVIII