Achilles had come in for his share of questioning.  The child had been to his shop it seemed... and the papers took it up and made much of it—­there were headlines and pictures... the public was interested.  The tale grew to a romance, and fathers and mothers and children in Boston and New York and London heard how Betty had sat in the gay little fruit-shop—­and listened to Achilles’s stories of Athens and Greece, and of the Acropolis—­and of the studies in Greek history, and her gods and goddesses and the temples and ruins lying packed in their boxes waiting her return.  The daily papers were a thrilling tale—­with the quick touch of love and human sympathy that brings the world together.

To Achilles it was as if the hand of Zeus had reached and touched the child—­and she was not.  What god sheltered her beneath a magic veil—­so that she passed unseen?  He lifted his face, seeking in air and sun and cloud, a token.  Over the lake came the great breeze, speaking to him, and out of the air a thousand hands reached to him—­to tell him of the child.  But he could not find the place that held her.  In the dusky shop, he held his quiet way.  No one, looking, would have guessed—­“Two cen’s, yes,” and his swift fingers made change while his eyes searched every face.  But the child, in her shining cloud, was not revealed.

When he was summoned before the detectives and questioned, with swift sternness, it was his own questions that demanded answer—­and got it.  The men gathered in the library, baffled by the search, and asking futile, dreary questions, learned to wait in amusement for the quick, searching gestures flung at them and the eager face that seemed to drink their words.  Gradually they came to understand—­the Greek was learning the science of kidnapping—­its methods and devices and the probable plan of approach.  But the Chief shook his head.  “You won’t trace these men by any of the old tricks.  It’s a new deal.  We shall only get them by a fluke.”  And to his own men he said, “Try any old chance, boys, run it down—­if it takes weeks—­Harris won’t compromise—­and you may stumble on a clue.  The man that finds it makes money.”  Gradually they drew their lines around the city; but still, from the tapped wires, the messages came—­to them, sitting in conclave in the library—­to Philip Harris in his bare office and to the mother, waiting alone in her room.

At last she could not bear it.  “I cannot hold out, Philip,” she said, one day, when he had come in and found her hanging up the receiver with a fixed look.  “Don’t trust me, dear.  Take me away.”  And that night the big car had borne her swiftly from the city, out to the far-breathing air of the plain and the low hills.  In her room in the house on the lake, her little telephone bell tinkled, and waited, and rang again—­baffled by long silence and by discreet replies....  The tapped wires concentrated now upon Philip Harris, working by suggestion, and veiled threat, on his overwrought