"I've always cared for her," he said, and I knew what his answer was going to be before he spoke. "But it's no use. It's all over. It's over and done with. There's not even a mistake about it."
"There must be. And I'm going to find out where and what it is."
"And how are you going to find that out?" he reiterated.
"Come along with me," I cried a little presumptuously, a little excitedly, "and by ten o'clock to-night I'll have your reason for you!"
My flash-in-the-pan enthusiasm was shorter lived than I had expected. The tingling and wine-like warmth soon disappeared. A reaction set in, once we were out in the cool night air. And in that reaction I began to see difficulties, to marshal doubts and misgivings.
The suspicion crept over me that, after all, I might have been talking to a man with a slightly unbalanced mind. Delusions, such as his, I knew, were not uncommon. There were plenty of amiable cranks who carried about some fixed conviction of their one-time intimate association with the great, the settled belief that they are the oppressed and unrecognized friends of earth's elect.
Yet this did not altogether fill the bill; it could not explain away everything. There was still the mystery of the girl in the Twenty-fourth Street rooming-house. There was still the enigma of two persons claiming to be Harriet Walter.
On my way down to that rooming-house an idea occurred to me. It prompted me to step in at my club for a minute or two, leaving Mallory in the car. Then I dodged back to the reading-room, took down from its shelf a Who's Who on the Stage, and turned up the name of Harriet Walter.
There, to my discomfiture, I read that Harriet Walter's family name was recorded as "Kellock," and instead of being a Canadian, and born and brought up in the western town of Medicine Hat, as young Mallory had claimed, her birthplace was recorded as Lansing, Michigan. She had been educated at the Gilder Seminary in Boston, and had later studied one year at the Wheatley Dramatic School in New York. From there she had gone on the stage, taking small parts, but soon convincing her management that she was capable of better things. In little over a year she had been made a star in the Broken Ties production.
The St. Luke's officials, after all, had not been so far wrong. The young man in the velour hat was clearly off his trolley.