“Oh, it’s you. Well?”

“Look here, Mr. Carter! Call me a fool if you want, but look here!” He held up a photographic plate still wet. It was clear and without a shadow. “I waited outside Grey’s for him and Maxwell and—” Barnes paused curiously, an inscrutable glance moving over his hard features—“the other person, and just as they stepped out, I got a good shot. He was looking squarely at me. And you can think what you like, but here is all I got!”

“Let me see.” Carter’s hand shot out with a vicious gesture, and in the attempt to pass the plate over to him, it slipped out of Barnes’s fingers and fell on the floor, breaking up into small pieces. He stooped down, picked up one of the larger fragments, and held it up to the light, looking at it as if fascinated.

“This will make the greatest story yet, Mr. Carter. It’s great.”

“Do you mean to tell me—” Carter spoke roughly.

“I mean to say, I had as fair a shot at him as I ever had at anyone, and there is the result.”

“You and that cub Logan must have a nice bunch of plates.” Carter, in a few words, retold the incident of Logan’s failure to secure a negative.

Barnes listened gravely, and did not reply to Carter’s sarcastic advice to overhaul the developer. He sat thoughtfully eyeing the editor, and did not reply to a question until Carter had angrily asked it twice.

“Can’t you tell what he looked like?”

“Yes. He looked like an average man . . . only different.”

“Different how?”

“I can’t describe it exactly. But he was different.”

“Well, go on,” Carter said impatiently when Barnes stopped, while the same shadow of wonder crossed his face as when he was looking at the photographic plate.

“When he came out of Grey’s house with Grey and Mr. Maxwell, I was as near to him as I am to you now. He stopped and spoke naturally and pleasantly to all the newspapermen and answered their questions. He is going to preach in Maxwell’s church tomorrow. I forgot to say he has a most wonderful voice. I have never heard anything like it anywhere.”

“Well,” said Carter, “what then?”

“He walked along with Mr. Grey and the Reverend Maxwell and . . .”

Again that pause, so different from Barnes’s usual self-satisfied, confident manner, as if his eyes and thought were intent on something far different from the surroundings in Carter’s office.

“What’s the matter with you?” Carter’s sharp voice broke in.

“As he went up the street toward Mr. Maxwell’s house, a number of school children came down the walk. We were all following along, and two of the children broke from the group they were with and went right up to—this—person.” Barnes uttered the word with strange hesitation. “And each child took a hand and walked along with him. Mr. Maxwell called them by name and said they belonged to his Sunday school, but they didn’t come to him. They came to this stranger.”