Randolph Trent’s consternation at the loss of the portmanteau was partly superstitious.  For, although it was easy to make up the small sum taken, and the papers were safe in Miss Avondale’s possession, yet this displacement of the only link between him and his missing benefactor, and the mystery of its disappearance, raised all his old doubts and suspicions.  A vague uneasiness, a still more vague sense of some remissness on his own part, possessed him.

That the portmanteau was taken from his room during his absence with Miss Avondale that afternoon was evident.  The door had been opened by a skeleton key, and as the building was deserted on Sunday, there had been no chance of interference with the thief.  If mere booty had been his object, the purse would have satisfied him without his burdening himself with a portmanteau which might be identified.  Nothing else in the room had been disturbed.  The thief must have had some cognizance of its location, and have kept some espionage over Randolph’s movements—­a circumstance which added to the mystery and his disquiet.  He placed a description of his loss with the police authorities, but their only idea of recovering it was by leaving that description with pawnbrokers and second-hand dealers, a proceeding that Randolph instinctively felt was in vain.

A singular but instinctive reluctance to inform Miss Avondale of his loss kept him from calling upon her for the first few days.  When he did, she seemed concerned at the news, although far from participating in his superstition or his suspicions.

“You still have the letter and photograph—­whatever they may be worth—­for identification,” she said dryly, “although Bobby cannot remember about the letter.  He thinks he went once with his father to a photographer and had a picture taken, but he cannot remember seeing it afterward.”  She was holding them in her hand, and Randolph almost mechanically took them from her and put them in his pocket.  He would not, perhaps, have noticed his own brusqueness had she not looked a little surprised, and, he thought, annoyed.  “Are you quite sure you won’t lose them?” she said gently.  “Perhaps I had better keep them for you.”

“I shall seal them up and put them in the bank safe,” he said quickly.  He could not tell whether his sudden resolution was an instinct or the obstinacy that often comes to an awkward man.  “But,” he added, coloring, “I shall always regret the loss of the portmanteau, for it was the means of bringing us together.”

“I thought it was the umbrella,” said Miss Avondale dryly.

She had once before halted him on the perilous edge of sentiment by a similar cynicism, but this time it cut him deeply.  For he could not be blind to the fact that she treated him like a mere boy, and in dispelling the illusions of his instincts and beliefs seemed as if intent upon dispelling his illusions of her; and in her half-smiling abstraction he read only the well-bred toleration of one who is beginning to be bored.  He made his excuses early and went home.  Nevertheless, although regretting he had not left her the letter and photograph, he deposited them in the bank safe the next day, and tried to feel that he had vindicated his character for grown-up wisdom.