garden. The vegetation of the rock plants was scanty at this season; a little fountain was frozen over. But he could imagine that in spring and summer this was a very pleasant spot. In the frosty sunlight a small, curly-haired boy was romping with a nurse, a capable-looking woman nearing middle age. Her habitual expression Hepburn assumed to be grim, but now she was laughing gaily as she played with her little charge.
Her gaiety was nor forced—that of a dutiful employee; it radiated real happiness. With the aid of a pile of cushions set beside the wall the small boy was making strenuous endeavours to stand on his head. His flushed face, every time that he collapsed and looked up at her, reduced the nurse to helpless laughter. He gave it up after a while and sat there grinning.
“God bless us, bairn, you’ll bring all the blood to your daft little head if you keep on,” she exclaimed, speaking with a marked Scottish accent.
“Is there blood in my head, Goofy?” the boy inquired, wide eyed. “I fought it on’y came up to here”—he indicated his throat.
“Where d’you think it comes from when your nose bleeds?”
“Never fought of that, Goofy.”
Mark Hepburn, watching the mop of red-brown curls ruffled by the breeze, the clear blue eyes, the formation of the child’s mouth, the roundness of his chin, experienced an unfamiliar sensation of weakness compounded of pity and of swift, intense affection. He turned his head slowly, looking at Moya Adair.
Her lips trembled, but her eyes were happy as she smiled up at him and waited.
“There’s no need for me to ask.” He said. His harsh voice seemed to have softened slightly. He was recalling the details of Mrs. Adair’s record which he had been at such pains to secure. “I should have remembered.”
“Yes.” She nodded. “My big son. He’s just four. . . .”
When, presently, Mark Hepburn met Robbie Adair, the boy registered approval save in regard to Hepburn’s budding beard. He was a healthy frank young ruffian and took no pains to disguise his distastes. He had a disarmingly cheerful grin.
“I like you, Uncle Mark, all ‘cept your whiskers,” was his summary.
This dislike of beards, so expressed, produced a shocked protest from Nurse Goff and led to further inquiries by Moya, frowning, although her eyes danced with laughter. Interrogation brought to light the fact that Robbie associated beards and untidy hair with a peculiar form of insanity.
“There’s someone I know, up there,” he explained, pointing vaguely apparently towards heaven; “his hair blows about in the wind all in a mess like yours. And he’s got funny whiskers too. He makes heads. He holds ‘em up and then he smashes ‘em. So you see, Uncle Mark, he is mad.”
Robbie grinned.
“Whatever are you talking about, Robbie?” Moya, kneeling on a cushion, threw her arm around the boy’s shoulders and glanced up at Mark Hepburn. “Do
Mark shook his head slowly, looking into the beautiful eyes upraised to his, so like, yet so wonderfully different from, the eyes of the boy. He became aware of the fact that he was utterly happy; a kind of happiness he had never known before. And down upon this unlawful joy (for why should
Some change in Hepburn’s expression made Moya turn aside. She pressed her cheek against Robbie’s curly head.
“We don’t know what you mean, dear,” she said. “Won’t you tell us?
“I mean,” said Robbie stoutly, turning and staring into her face from a distance of not more than an inch away. “there’s a man who is a man; he has whiskers: and he lives up there!”
“Where exactly do you mean, Robbie?”
She glanced aside at Mark Hepburn. He was watching her intently.
The boy pointed.
“On the very top of that tall tower.”
Mark Hepbum stared in the direction which Robbie indicated. The building in question was the Stratton Tower, one of New York’s very high buildings, and the same which formed a feature of the landscape as viewed from the apartment he shared with Nayland Smith. He continued to stare in that direction, endeavouring to capture some memory which the sight of the oblisk-like structure topped by a pointed dome sharply outlined against that cold, blue sky, stirred in his mind.
He stood up, walked to the wall surrounding the roof garden and took his bearings. He realized that he stood at a level much below that of the fortieth floor of the Regal Tower, but in point of distance much nearer to the building the boy indicated.
“He always comes out at night. On’y sometimes I’s asleep and don’t see him.”
It was the word “night,” which gave Hepburn the clue, captured a furtive memory—a memory of three lighted windows at the top of the Stratton Tower which he had seen and speculated about on the night when, with Nayland Smith, he had waited for the coming of Fly Carlo.
He turned and stared at Robbie with new interest.
“You say he makes heads, young fellow?”
“Yes. I see him up there, making ‘em.”
“At night?”
“Not always.”
“And then you say he smashes them?”
