“Anyway, I devoutly trust it’s all over now. The end has been accomplished, and the world will be the better for it in the end. Yet it has been at a fearful cost.”
“Yes,” said Regnier, “but a single great war would have meant the death of many thousands more.”
“One thing I should like to know,” said Tom reflectively, “How do you account for your loss of memory?”
“I’m not sure,” answered Regnier, “but, if you remember, there was a paper published by some Germans a while ago, which discussed the properties of an anaesthetic which produced a loss of memory. It was one of the hydrocarbon compounds, and from the odor which came to me, I think my loss of memory may have come that way.”
“That’s a possible solution,” said Tom. “At least it will do, unless we strike a better. But, confound it all, we haven’t got ‘the man’ who has been at the bottom of all this.”
“Well, the search isn’t over yet,” interrupted Dorothy. “We can go on with it, now.”
“We will go on with it,” I broke in. “But I think we can do it much better from New York for a while.”
Tom laughed. “Yes,” he said. “There is no question that as long as Dorothy has made up her mind to be married in New York, New York is the one place from which to conduct the search for the present. Anyway, I’m not going to Tokio. I imagine ‘the man’ will come right back home now.”
“The Denckel apparatus was the means that stopped ‘the man,’ after all,” I said musingly. “It has done so much, that I hope it will do the final thing of all, and discover ‘the man.’”
Dorothy rose. “I hope it will,” she remarked. “But, anyway, we’ve sat long enough. Now the thing I want to know is what our host has to say of the way Dick came here.”