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"You have not found Evelyn Rand."

"No sir," I agreed. "But I—"

"No excuses, Mr. March." The office was enormous, the desk massive, but sitting behind the latter Pierpont Alton Sturdevant dominated both. Not because of any physical quality. He was below average in stature nor did his graying hair have the patches of white at the temples that fiction writers and the illustrators of advertisements seem to think are the invariable mark of 'men of distinction.' It was rather his hawk's nose and the sexless austerity of his thin mouth that made me think of him as resembling some Roman Emperor, and myself, a very junior attorney on the staff of the august firm of Sturdevant, Hamlin, Mosby and Garfield, as some young centurion returned from Ulterior Gaul. "You should know by this time," the dry voice rustled, "that I am not interested in excuses, but only in facts."

I had, in truth, just returned to the city, from the remote reaches of suburban Westchester, and what I had to report was failure. "The fact is, sir, that I have not found Evelyn Rand."

Sturdevant was very still, looking at me in the huge leather armchair to which he'd motioned me with a terse, 'Good morning.' He was expressionless and still for a long moment and then he asked, "If you continue searching for her, how soon do you think you will be able to locate her?"

I didn't like that if. I didn't like it at all but I contrived to keep my dismay out of my face and my voice. "I can't say, Mr. Sturdevant. I haven't been able to unearth a single clue as to what happened to her." The girl had walked out of her Park Avenue apartment house that Sunday morning, two weeks ago yesterday, and vanished. "The doorman seems to have been the last person ever to see her. He offered to call a taxi for her and she said that she would walk to church. He watched her go down the block and around the corner."

* * * * *

"I could not take my eyes off the lass," the grizzled attendant had told me, "though my 'phone was buzzing like mad. She swung along freelike an' springy like as if it was the ould sod was under her feet ate not this gray cancrete that chokes the good dirt. I was minded o' the way my own Kathleen used to come up Balmorey Lane to meet me after work was done, longer ago than I care to think."

By the way he spoke and the look in his faded eyes, I knew I needed only to tell him what it would mean to Evelyn Rand if the fact that she had never returned—never been seen again, got out, to keep him silent. And so it had been with the elevator boy who had brought her down from her penthouse home and with the servants she had there; the granite-faced butler, the buxom cook, Renee Bernos, the black-haired and vivacious maid. Each of them would go to prison for life sooner than say a single word that might harm her. Nor was this because she was generous with her wages and her tips. One cannot buy love.

* * * * *

"That is all you have been able to discover," Sturdevant pressed me.

"That is all."

"In other words you are precisely where you were two weeks ago," he murmured, "except for this." He turned a paper on his desk so that I could see it, then tapped it with a long, bony finger. "Except, Mr. March, for this."

ESTATE OF DARIUS RAND in the MATTER OF EVELYN RAND,

debtor to STURDEVANT, HAMLIN AND STURDEVANT.

1-27-47 ½ hr. P. A. Sturdevant, Esq. @$400 $ 200.00 1-27-47-2/10/47 88¼ hrs. Mr. John March @ $25 $2206.25 1-27-47 Disbursements and expenses to Mr. John March (acct. 2-10-47 attached) $ 64.37 Total $2470.62

"Two thousand, four hundred and seventy dollars and sixty-two cents," Sturdevant's finger tapped the total, "up to last Saturday. To which must be added the charge for this quarter hour of my time and yours, plus whatever you have spent over the weekend. Two and a half thousand dollars, Mr. March, and no result."

He paused but I said nothing. I was waiting for what he would say next.

He said it. "As trustee of the Estate of Darius Rand I cannot approve any further expenditure. You will return to your regular duties, Mr. March, and I shall notify the police that Miss Rand has disappeared."

And that was when I lost my grip on myself—"No!" I fairly yelled as I came up to my feet. "You can't do that to her." He wasn't the Head of the Firm to me in that moment. He was a shrivelled old curmudgeon whose scrawny neck I lusted to wring. "You can't make her a pauper. You don't know what you're doing."

I stopped. Not by reason of anything Sturdevant said or did, for he said or did nothing. I don't know how he made me aware I was making a fool of myself, but he did.

And now he said, quietly, "I know exactly what I am doing. I know better than you do that because of the embarrassment his actress wife had caused him, before she died, by trailing her escapades through the newspapers, Darius Rand's will tied up his fortune in a trust fund the income of which goes to his daughter Evelyn only as long as her name never appears for any reason whatsoever in the news columns of the public press. When she vanished I determined as her legal guardian to conceal the situation for a reasonable length of time since a report to the police must inevitably bring her name into the newspapers. That reasonable time has in my opinion now expired without any hope of her return and I no longer can justify my silence. Therefore, as trustee of—"

"The Estate of Darius Rand," I broke in. "You're measuring the happiness of a girl against dollars and cents."

The faint shadow that clouded Sturdevant's ascetic countenance might mean I'd gotten under his skin but his answer did not admit it.

"No, Mr. March. I am measuring a sentimental attachment to a young lady over whose welfare I have watched for more than six years against the dictates of duty and conscience."

"Aren't there times, sir, when one may compromise a bit with duty and even conscience?" Not him, I thought. Not this dried mummy, but I had to try to persuade him. "Give me a week more. Just the week. I'll take a leave of absence without pay, I'll even resign, so you won't have to charge the Estate for my time. I'll pay the expenses out of my own pocket. If you'll only keep this thing away from the police and the papers for a week I'll find Evelyn. I'm sure I will."

Gray eyebrows arched minutely. "It seems to me that you are oddly concerned," Sturdevant mused, "with a young lady whom you have never seen, whom you never even heard of up to fourteen days ago. Or am I mistaken in that?"

"No," I admitted. "Fourteen days ago I was not aware that Evelyn Rand existed. But today," I leaned forward, palms pressing hard on the desktop, "today I think I know her better even than I know myself. I know her emotional makeup, how she would react in any conceivable situation. I have literally steeped myself in her personality. I have spent hours in her home, her library, her boudoir. I have talked on one pretext or another with everyone who was close to her; her servants, her dressmaker, her hairdresser. I know that her hair is the color of honey and exactly how she wears it. I know that she favors light blues in her dress and pastel tones of pink and green. I have even smelled the perfume she had especially compounded for her."

* * * * *

In his little shop on East Sixty-third Street, the walrus-mustached old German in the long chemist's smock had looked long and uncertainly at me. "Ich weiss nicht—" he muttered.

"You say a friend from Fraulein Rand you are und a bottle from her individual perfoom you want to buy her for a present. Aber I don't know. Ven I say so schoen ein maedchen many loffers must haff, she laughs und says she hass none. She says dot ven someone she finds who can say to her so true tings about her as dot I say in der perfoom I make for her, den she vill haff found her loffer but such a one she hass not yet met."

"Look," I argued. "Would I know the number of the formula if she had not told it to me?"

It was from Renee Bernos I had gotten it, but the German was convinced. When I opened the tiny bottle he'd sold me for enough to have fed a slum family a month, my dreary hotel room was filled with the fragrance of spring; of arbutus and crocuses and hyacinths and the evasive scent of leaf-buds; and with another fainter redolence I could not name but that was the very essence of dreams.

For a moment it had seemed almost is if Evelyn Rand herself was there in my room...

* * * * *

"Ah," Sturdevant murmured. "What did you hope to accomplish by so strange a procedure?"

"I figured that if I could understand her, if I could get inside her mind somehow, I should know exactly what was in it when she walked down Park Avenue to Seventy-third Street and turned the corner and never reached the church for which apparently she had set out."

"Is that all you've done in two weeks?"

"This weekend I went out to the house in which Evelyn's childhood was spent. It is closed, of course, but I got the keys from your secretary. I spent most of Saturday in that house and all of yesterday."

* * * * *

The other rooms had told me nothing about Evelyn Rand, and now I was in the last one, the nursery. It was dim and dusty and musty-smelling, for it had been closed and never again entered after a little girl of six had been sent to boarding school because her mother had no time to be bothered with her.

I pulled out a bureau drawer too far. It fell to the floor and split and that was how I found the thing that had slipped into the crack between the drawer's side and its warped bottom, at least fourteen years ago.

As my fingers closed on the bit of carved stone that lay in a clutter of doll's clothes, battered toys and mummified insects, something seemed to flow from it and into me; a vague excitement.

And a vaguer fear.

It was slightly smaller than a dime, approximately an eighth of an inch thick and roughly circular in outline and there was, strangely enough, no dust upon it. It was black, a peculiar, glowing black that though utterly unrelieved appeared to shimmer with a colorless iridescence so that almost it seemed I held in my palm a bit of black light strangely solid. Too, it was incongruously heavy for its size, and when on impulse I tested it, I found it hard enough to scratch glass.

The latter circumstance made more remarkable the accomplishment of the artist who had fashioned the gem. For it was not a solid mass with a design etched seal-like upon it, but a filigree of ebony coils that rose to its surface and descended within its small compass and writhed again into view 'til the eye grew weary of following the Findings.

Close-packed and intricate as were the thread-thin loops, they formed a single continuous line. True, two or three of the coils were interrupted at one point in the periphery by a wedge-shaped gap about an eighth of an inch deep, but the rough edges of the break made it obvious that this was the result of some later accident and not a Part of the original intent.

I could not bring myself to believe that any human could have had the skill and the infinite patience to have carved this out of a single piece of whatever the stone was. It must have been made in parts and cemented together. I bent closer to see if I could find some seam, some evidence of jointure.

I saw none. But I saw the snake's head.

Almost microscopically small yet exquisitely fashioned, it lay midway between the gem's slightly convex surfaces, at its very center. I made out the lidless eyes, the nostrils, the muscles at the corners of the distended mouth.

To avoid any interruption of the design, as I then thought, the reptile had been carved as swallowing its own tail.

A strange, weird toy for a little girl, I thought, and put it away in my vest pocket meaning to fathom out later what it could tell me about Evelyn Rand.

* * * * *

"You seem to have been making a good thing of your assignment," Pierpont Alton Sturdevant remarked, "wangling a week-end in the country out of it, at the Estate's expense."

I felt my face flush and anger pound my temples but if I said what I wanted to, what faint chance there was of persuading him to delay reporting Evelyn's disappearance would be lost. I swallowed, said, "I also talked to the woman who was Evelyn Rand's nurse and with whom she spent the summer before you sent her to college."

"And what did you learn from Faith Corbett?" For the first time a note of interest crept into his voice although his face still was an expressionless Roman mask. "What did you learn from Evelyn's old nurse?"

What I had learned he would not understand. "Nothing," I answered him. "Nothing that I can put into words."

* * * * *

Faith Corbett, so shrunken and fragile it seemed she was one with the shadows of her tiny cottage, had asked me in for a cup of tea. "Evelyn was a dear child," her tenuous voice mused as the scrubbed kitchen grew misty with winter's early dusk, "but sometimes I was frightened of her. I would hear her prattling in the nursery and when I opened the door she would be quite alone, but she would look up at me with those great, gray eyes of hers and gravely say that so-and-so had been there just now, and it would be a name I had never heard."

"Oh," I said. "She was just an imaginative child. And she was always alone except for you and so dreamed up playmates for herself."

"Perhaps so," the old woman agreed, "but she was no child that summer she stayed here with me, and what happened the day before she went away I did not understand and I will never forget."

She took a nibble of toast and a sip of tea and though I waited silently for her to go on, she did not. Her thoughts had wandered from what she'd been saying, as old people's thoughts have a way of doing. "What was it?" I called them back. "What happened the day before Evelyn went away to college?"

"I was packing her trunk," the old lady mused. "I could not find her tennis shoes so I went downstairs to ask her what she had done with them. Evelyn was not in the house, but when I went out to the porch I saw her on the garden path. She was going toward the gate through the twilight, and there was an eagerness in the way she moved that was new to her.

"I stood and watched, my heart fluttering in my breast, for I knew there was no youngster about that ever had had so much as a second glance from my sweet. She came to the gate and stopped there, taking hold of the pickets with her hands. Like a quiet white flame she was as she looked down the road.

"They had not put the macadam on it yet and the dust lay glimmering in the dimness. All of a sudden Evelyn got stiff-like and I looked to see who was coming.

"The road was as empty and still as it had been before, and there was no one upon it.

"The air was smoky, kind of, like it gets in the fall and there wasn't a leaf stirring, but there must have been a breath of wind on the road 'cause I saw a little whirl of dust come drifting along it. When it came to the gate where Evelyn was, it almost stopped. But it whispered away, and all at once it was gone.

"All the eagerness was out of Evelyn. I heard her sob and I ran down the path calling her name. She turned. There were tears on her cheeks. 'Not yet', she sobbed. 'Oh Faith! It isn't time yet.'"

"'It isn't time for what?' I asked her, but she would say nothing more and I knew it was no use to ask again. And the next day she went away..."

Faith Corbett's voice went on and on about how she rented this cottage with the pension the Estate granted her and how it was hard to live alone, but I heard her with only half an ear. I was thinking of how in that smoky fall twilight it had seemed to Faith Corbett as if Evelyn Rand were going down through the garden to meet her lover, and I was recalling how the grizzled old doorman had said, 'I was minded a' the way my Kathleen used to walk up Balmorey Lane to meet me.' And trailing across my brain had been the frightening thought that perhaps when Evelyn Rand had turned the corner into Seventy-third Street a whirl of dust might have come whispering across the asphalt...

* * * * *

"You learned nothing at all from Evelyn's old nurse?" Sturdevant insisted. "I cannot quite believe that."

"Well," I conceded, "she did make me certain the girl was unhappy and lonely in that motherless home of hers. But, as an imaginative child will, she found ways of consoling herself."

"Such as?"

"Such as writing verse." I indicated the yellowed papers I had laid on Sturdevant's desk when I came in.

* * * * *

The only light left in the cottage kitchen had been the wavering radiance of the coal fire in the range. So much talking had tired Faith Corbett and she nodded in her chair, all but asleep.

"Thank you for the tea," I said rising. "I'll be going along now."

The old woman came awake with a start. "Wait," she exclaimed. "Wait! I have something to show you. Something nobody but me has ever seen before." She rose too and went out of the room, the sound of her feet on the clean boards like the patter of a child's feet except that it was slower. I stood waiting and wondering, and in a little while she was back with a number of yellowed papers in her hand, pencilled writing pale and smudged upon them.

"Here," she said, giving them to me. "Maybe they will help you find her."

The papers rustled in my hand. I had been very careful to conceal from Faith Corbett the object of my visit and I was wondering how she could possibly know Evelyn Rand had vanished.

* * * * *

"Verse?" Sturdevant peered at the sheets as he might have looked at something slightly distasteful. "Poems?"

Eager as I was to pierce the dry husk of rectitude in which he was encased, I had sense enough to retreat from my intention of reading to him, in that great room with its drape-smothered windows and its walls lined by drab law books, the lines a child had penned in a sun-bright garden. He would hear the limping rhythm and the faulty rhymes; he never would understand the wistful imagery of the words, the nostalgia for some vaguely apprehended Otherland where all was different and being different must be happier.

"Poems," I assented. "They have told me more than anything else exactly what Evelyn Rand is like."

"And so it has cost the Estate almost two and a half thousand dollars to find out that Evelyn Rand once wrote poems. You haven't even located a photograph of her, so that I can give the authorities more to go by than a word of mouth description."

As far as anyone knew Evelyn never had been photographed. But, "I've done better than that," I said, triumphantly. "I've found out that a portrait of her is in existence, painted by—" I named a very famous artist but shall not, for reasons that shortly appear, repeat that name here.

"Indeed. Why did you not bring that portrait here instead of these?" He flicked a contemptuous finger at the sheaf of old papers. "Why did you not bring it here, Mr. March?"

"Because it is in a gallery on Madison Avenue. I intend to go there as soon as you finish with me and—"

Sturdevant's frosty look checked me. "You seem to forget, Mr. March, that I have cancelled your assignment to this matter."

There it was. I hadn't changed his decision in the least. My disappointment was too keen for speech for an instant, and in that instant the Call-O-Vox on his desk grated, with its metallic distortion of human tones: "Nine-thirty, Mr. Sturdevant. Mr. Holland of United States Steel is here for his appointment."

Sturdevant clicked the switch that permitted his secretary to hear him. "Send Mr. Holland in, Miss Carter. And please make a note. John March has been granted a leave of absence without pay for one week from date. This office will do nothing in the matter of Evelyn Rand until Monday the twenty-first."

He turned to me and I swear that there was a twinkle in his eyes. "Do not forget, Mr. March," he said, using a well-worn lawyer's phrase, "that time is of the essence of this contract."

I was to recall that warning, but in a sense far different from that which he intended.