books that had whetted his passion for the past, when his student
mind was first kindling to buried cities and forgotten tombs and all
the strange store and loot of time.

Paul Delcassé. He didn't remember a word of the book, but he
remembered that he had read it with absorption. And now the special
agent, delighted at the recognition, was talking eagerly of the
writer.

"He was a brilliant young man, monsieur, but he was of no importance
to his generation--and he becomes so now through the whim of a
capricious woman to disinherit her other heirs. After all this time
she has decided to make active inquiries."

"But you said that Delcassé had died--"

"He left a wife and child. Her letters of her husband's death
reached his relatives in France, then nothing more. They feared that
the same fever--but nothing, positively, was known.... A sad story,
monsieur.... This Delcassé was young and adventurous and an ardent
explorer. An ardent lover, too, for he brought a beautiful French
wife to share the hazards of his expedition--"

"An ardent idiot," thrust in McLean unfeelingly. "Knocking a woman
about the desert.... Not much chance of a clue after all these
years," he concluded with a very British air of dismissal.

But the French agent was not to be sundered from the American who
remembered the book of Delcassé.