His father lay as if asleep.  “Go for the doctor at once!  Bring him back with you.  Run!” he cried to the servant.  Custom and instinct said, “Send for the doctor,” but he knew in his heart that no ministrations would ever reach the still figure on the bed, upon which, for the moment, he could not look.  It was but a few minutes (how long such minutes are!) before the doctor came—­Doctor Willis, who had brought John into the world, and had been a lifelong friend of both father and son.  He went swiftly to the bed without speaking, and made a brief examination, while John watched him with fascinated eyes; and as the doctor finished, the son dropped on his knees by the bed, and buried his face in it.  The doctor crossed the room to Jeffrey, who was standing in the door with an awe-stricken face, and in a low voice gave him some directions.  Then, as the man departed, he first glanced at the kneeling figure and then looked searchingly about the room.  Presently he went over to the grate in which were the ashes of an extinct fire, and, taking the poker, pressed down among them and covered over a three or four ounce vial.  He had found what he was looking for.

* * * * *

There is no need to speak of the happenings of the next few days, nor is it necessary to touch at any length upon the history of some of the weeks and months which ensued upon this crisis in John Lenox’s life, a time when it seemed to him that everything he had ever cared for had been taken.  And yet, with that unreason which may perhaps be more easily understood than accounted for, the one thing upon which his mind most often dwelt was that he had had no answer to his note to Mary Blake.  We know what happened to her missive.  It turned up long afterward in the pocket of Master Jacky Carling’s overcoat; so long afterward that John, so far as Mary was concerned, had disappeared altogether.  The discovery of Jacky’s dereliction explained to her, in part at least, why she had never seen him or heard from him after that last evening at Sixty-ninth Street.  The Carlings went away some ten days later, and she did, in fact, send another note to his house address, asking him to see them before their departure; but John had considered himself fortunate in getting the house off his hands to a tenant who would assume the lease if given possession at once, and had gone into the modest apartment which he occupied during the rest of his life in the city, and so the second communication failed to reach him.  Perhaps it was as well.  Some weeks later he walked up to the Carlings’ house one Sunday afternoon, and saw that it was closed, as he had expected.  By an impulse which was not part of his original intention—­which was, indeed, pretty nearly aimless—­he was moved to ring the doorbell; but the maid, a stranger to him, who opened the door could tell him nothing of the family’s whereabouts, and Mr. Betts (the house man in charge) was “hout.”  So John retraced his steps with a feeling of disappointment wholly disproportionate to his hopes or expectations so far as he had defined them to himself, and never went back again.