“Young lady to speak to me?” murmured Larry, as he took the telephone.

“This is Grace Potter,” he heard through the instrument.

“Oh, how are you?” called Larry, for want of something better to say.

“Come right up,” Grace said.  “I have some news for you.”

“What is it?”

“I have a letter from my father!”

“A letter from your father?  Where is he?  How did it come?  Who brought it?  Is he home?”

Larry fired these questions out rapidly.  But there was a click in the ’phone that told him the connection was cut off.  Evidently Grace had no time to tell more.

“Hurry up there!” exclaimed Mr. Emberg, as soon as he understood the import of the message Larry had received.  “This will be a feature of to-day’s story!  Hurry, Larry!”

Larry thought the transportation facilities in New York were never so slow as on that journey to the Potter house.  He tried to imagine, on the way up, what sort of a letter Grace had received from her father.  That it contained good news he judged from the cheerful note in her voice.

“Things seem to be happening quite rapidly,” the young reporter mused, as he got off at the elevated station nearest to his destination.  “First thing I know I’ll find him, and then I’ll not have a chance to see Grace any more.”

He dwelt on this thought, half-laughing at himself.

“I guess I’d better stop thinking of her and attend strictly to this disappearance business,” he murmured as he went up the steps of the Potter mansion.  “She’s too rich for one thing, and another is I’m too poor, though I’m earning good wages, and we have some money in the bank,” for the sale of the Bronx land, as related in “Larry Dexter, Reporter,” had netted Mrs. Dexter and her children about ten thousand dollars.

Larry’s ring at the bell was answered by Grace, who, it would seem, had been on the watch for him.

“I thought you would never come,” she said.  “I telephoned ever so long ago.”

“I came as fast as I could,” Larry responded.  “Where is the letter?”

Grace held out to him a small piece of paper.  On it was but a single line of writing.  It read: 

“Am well.  Have to stay away for a time.  Don’t worry.  Will write again.”

It was signed with Mr. Potter’s name.

“Are you sure it’s from your father?” asked Larry, thinking some cruel person might be trying to play a joke, or that some enterprising reporter had sent the message for the sake of making news.  Such things are sometimes done by New York newspaper men, though their city editors may know nothing about it.

“I couldn’t mistake father’s writing,” replied Grace.  “Mamma knows it is from him, and she is much happier.  But we can’t imagine why he has to stay away.”

“When did you get this, and how did it come?” asked the reporter.

“The postman brought it a little while ago.”