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Back she turned to seek out Searle, he of up-to-date real estate. In a dingy office upstairs over the local harness store a lean and rangy gentleman raised a brindled beard above a roll-top desk and in answer to her first question crisply remarked, “Can’t tell.”

“But surely if she put her property in your hands for disposal she must have given you some address where you might communicate with her?” pressed Miss Smith.

“Oh, yes, she done that all right, but that ain’t the question you ast me first. You ast me if I could tell you where she was–and that I can’t do.”

“I see. Then I presume she left instructions with you not to give her present whereabouts to anyone?”

“Well, you might figger it out that way and mebbe not so far wrong,” said the cryptic Mr. Searle. “But if you think you’d like to buy or rent her place I’m fully empowered to act. Got the keys right here and a car standing outside–take you right on out there in a jiffy if you say the word.”

He rose up and followed her halfway down the steps, plainly torn between a desire to make a commission and a regret that under orders from his client he could furnish no details regarding her late movements.

“If you’re interested in any other piece of property in this vicinity–” were the last words she heard floating down the stair well as she passed out upon the uneven sidewalk.

She knew exactly what she meant to do next. At sight of her badge, as shown to him through his wicketed window marked “General Delivery,” the village postmaster gave her a number on a side street well up-town in New York, adding: “Going away, Mrs. Vinsolving particularly asked me not to tell anybody where her mail was to be sent on to. Kind of a secretive woman anyhow, she was, and besides she’s had some very pressing trouble come on her lately. I presume you’ve heard something about that matter?”

She nodded.

“I suppose now,” went on the postmaster, his features sharpening with curiosity, “that the Federal authorities ain’t looking into that particular matter? Not that I care to know myself, but I just thought it wouldn’t be any harm to ask.”

“No,” said Miss Smith, “I merely wanted to see her on a personal matter and I only let you see my credential in order to learn her forwarding address.”

Provided with the requisite information, she figured that before night she would interview the widow or know good reasons why. That the other woman had quitted her home seemingly in a hurry and with efforts at secrecy gave zest to the quest and added a trace of bepuzzlement to it too. Even so, she did not herself know what she meant to say to the woman when she had found her in her present abiding place or what questions she would ask. Only she knew that an inner prompting stronger than any reasoned-out process drove her forward upon her vague and blinded mission. Fool’s errand it might be–probably was–yet she meant to see it through.

But she had not reckoned upon the contingency that on this fine October forenoon, for the first time since buying his new touring car, Mr. Jake Goebel, shirt-waist manufacturer in a small way in Broome Street and head of a family in a large way in West One Hundred and Ninety-ninth Street, would be undertaking to drive the said car unaided and untutored by a more experienced charioteer on a trial spin up the Albany Post Road, accompanied–it being merely a five-passenger car–only by Mrs. Rosa Goebel, wife of the above, six little Goebels of assorted sizes and ages and Mrs. Goebel’s unmated sister, Miss Freda Hirschfeld of Rivington Street. In Getty Square, Yonkers, about noontime occurred a head-on collision, the subsequent upshots of which were variously that divers of those figuring in the accident went in the following directions: