At the breakfast table Sydney insisted that he felt plenty well enough to go to the office.
“Can’t you see, mother,” he said at last, “that it is a matter of the mind and not of the body. Let me have the opportunity of easing that, and—you will see the result.”
But when he left the house he did not go at once to his office. He stopped at the first drug store he passed, and walked up to the little stand on which the city directory was kept.
He turned the pages to D, and then looked up Darley.
There were several of the name, and a frown contracted his brow. But he took out his pencil and memorandum book, and made a note of the various addresses. Then he went on, but soon turned into a street that would not take him to the office. He boarded a car and rode off in the direction of South street. In the course of twenty minutes he was waiting for his ring to be answered at the door of a very modest little house near the Baltimore tracks.
But after he had been admitted, he did not remain long inside.
“I must try another,” he muttered, consulting his memorandum.
He tried several others, but with equal ill success. The quest seemed hopeless.
“There may be nothing in it after all,” he murmured. “But that does not lighten my load here;” and he pressed his hand over his heart.
All that day he kept up his hunt, scarcely stopping to get a little lunch at noon. Toward nightfall he called at an address on Seventh Street next to the last on his list.