speak of Dave's meeting with Monsieur Voisin, and I hardly needed
to tell her how it happened that my friend and Lossing were so
fortunately at hand.

'I am not surprised,' she said, when I had told my story, 'but I am,
oh, so thankful that you escaped with nothing worse. I felt so sure
there was danger, and I urged you into it. But if you had not gone, I
feel certain it would have been worse.'

She talked on in this strain for some moments, and it was plain to me,
though she did not put the thought into words, that she believed the
attack was meant for Lossing, and not for myself.

Suddenly she sprang up. 'I am forgetting poor Gerald Trent!' she
exclaimed, and crossing the room, unlocked her desk, took out the
letter, and placed it in my hands. It was a long letter, full of
lamentations and repetitions; telling the story in a rambling,
exclamatory, hysterical fashion; the letter of a young girl, a
stranger to sorrow and its discipline, who finds herself suddenly
plunged into a labyrinth of fear, terror, suspense; loving much and
tortured through that love; and her story was briefly this:

Mr. Trent had seized the opportunity afforded by the change in his
wife's condition, which, while neither really better nor worse, was
much quieter. 'In fact,' wrote Miss O'Neil, 'while she does not
recognise any of us, she constantly fancies us all about her, and she
talks to him in such a low, pathetic, pitiful tone, half an hour at a
time, and then drops into a doze, only to wake up and begin over
again. She does not know us, and while in this state, Dr. Lane says,
she is better alone with the nurse.' This being the case, Mr. Trent
had left home for a day to look after some long-neglected business
matter, and in his absence the letter had arrived. It was addressed to
Mr. Trent in a strange hand, a woman's hand it would seem, and it was
from Chicago. They had waited in anxious suspense until, chancing to
think that it might be an important message and a prompt answer
required, Miss Trent had, after some hesitation, opened the letter, a
copy of which was at this point inserted. It ran thus, beginning with
Mr. Trent's full name and correct address:

'SIR,

'In writing this I am perhaps risking my own life, as your
son's is risked every day that he passes a prisoner in a
place where he is as safely hidden as if he were already out
of the world.

'Not only is your boy a prisoner, but he is a sick man.