(in our profession
especially) sometimes leads to great results. I doubt, however, if you
will find it leading to much on this occasion. All I know of the mystery
of the Sanitarium, I know from Mr. Armadale: and he is entirely in the
dark on more than one point of importance. I have already told you how
they were entrapped into the house, and how they passed the night
there. To this I can now add that something did certainly happen to Mr.
Midwinter, which deprived him of consciousness; and that the doctor, who
appears to have been mixed up in the matter, carried things with a high
hand, and insisted on taking his own course in his own Sanitarium. There
is not the least doubt that the miserable woman (however she might have
come by her death) was found dead--that a coroner's inquest inquired
into the circumstances--that the evidence showed her to have entered
the house as a patient--and that the medical investigation ended in
discovering that she had died of apoplexy. My idea is that Mr. Midwinter
had a motive of his own for not coming forward with the evidence that he
might have given. I have also reason to suspect that Mr. Armadale,
out of regard for him, followed his lead, and that the verdict at the
inquest (attaching no blame to anybody) proceeded, like many other
verdicts of the same kind, from an entirely superficial investigation of
the circumstances.

"The key to the whole mystery is to be found, I firmly believe, in that
wretched woman's attempt to personate the character of Mr. Armadale's
widow when the news of his death appeared in the papers. But what first
set her on this, and by what inconceivable process of deception she
can have induced Mr. Midwinter to marry her (as the certificate proves)
under Mr. Armadale's name, is more than Mr. Armadale himself knows. The
point was not touched at the inquest, for the simple reason that the
inquest only concerned itself with the circumstances attending her
death. Mr. Armadale, at his friend's request, saw Miss Blanchard, and
induced her to silence old Darch on the subject of the claim that had
been made relating to the widow's income. As the claim had never been
admitted, even our stiff-necked brother practitioner consented for once
to do as he was asked. The doctor's statement that his patient was the
widow of a gentleman named Armadale was accordingly left unchallenged,
and so the matter has been hushed up. She is buried in the great
cemetery, near the place where