Alan gazed at him, bewildered. "The key to my house?"
"To the house on Astor Street," Sherrill confirmed. "Your father deeded the house and its furniture and all its contents to you the day before he disappeared. I have not the deed here; it came into my hands the day before yesterday at the same time I got possession of the pictures which might—or might not, for all I knew then—be you. I have the deed down-town and will give it to you. The house is yours in fee simple, given you by your father, not bequeathed to you by him to become your property after his death. He meant by that, I think, even more than the mere acknowledgment that he is your father."
Sherrill walked to the window and stood as though looking out, but his eyes were blank with thought.
"For almost twenty years," he said, "your father, as I have told you, lived in that house practically alone; during all those years a shadow of some sort was over him. I don't know at all, Alan, what that shadow was. But it is certain that whatever it was that had changed him from the man he was when I first knew him culminated three days ago when he wrote to you. It may be that the consequences of his writing to you were such that, after he had sent the letter, he could not bring himself to face them and so has merely ... gone away. In that case, as we stand here talking, he is still alive. On the other hand, his writing you may have precipitated something that I know nothing of. In either case, if he has left anywhere any evidence of what it is that changed and oppressed him for all these years, or if there is any evidence of what has happened to him now, it will be found in his house."
Sherrill turned back to Alan. "It is for you—not me, Alan," he said simply, "to make that search. I have thought seriously about it, this last half hour, and have decided that is as he would want it—perhaps as he did want it—to be. He could have told me what his trouble was any time in these twenty years, if he had been willing I should know; but he never did."
Sherrill was silent for a moment.
"There are some things your father did just before he disappeared that I have not told you yet," he went on. "The reason I have not told them is that I have not yet fully decided in my own mind what action they call for from me. I can assure you, however, that it would not help you now in any way to know them."
He thought again; then glanced to the key on the dresser and seemed to recollect.
"That key," he said, "is one I made your father give me some time ago; he was at home alone so much that I was afraid something might happen to him there. He gave it me because he knew I would not misuse it. I used it, for the first time, three days ago, when, after becoming certain something had gone wrong with him, I went to the house to search for him; my daughter used it this morning when she went there to wait for you. Your father, of course, had a key to the front door like this one; his servant has a key to the servants' entrance. I do not know of any other keys."
"The servant is in charge there now?" Alan asked.