ject of the young lady's prior
engagement. He only referred to it once when we were alone, merely
telling me, on that occasion, that his wife had done all that honor and
duty required of her in the matter, and that the engagement had been
broken off with the full approval of her parents. I never heard more
from him than this. For three years he and his wife lived together
happily. At the expiration of that time the symptoms of a serious
illness first declared themselves in Mrs. Arthur Holliday. It turned out
to be a long, lingering, hopeless malady. I attended her throughout. We
had been great friends when she was well, and we became more attached to
each other than ever when she was ill. I had many long and interesting
conversations with her in the intervals when she suffered least. The
result of one of those conversations I may briefly relate, leaving you
to draw any inferences from it that you please.

The interview to which I refer occurred shortly before her death.

I called one evening as usual, and found her alone, with a look in her
eyes which told me she had been crying. She only informed me at first
that she had been depressed in spirits, but by little and little she
became more communicative, and confessed to me that she had been looking
over some old letters which had been addressed to her, before she had
seen Arthur, by a man to whom she had been engaged to be married. I
asked her how the engagement came to be broken off. She replied that it
had not been broken off, but that it had died out in a very mysterious
way. The person to whom she was engaged--her first love, she called
him--was very poor, and there was no immediate prospect of their being
married. He followed my profession, and went abroad to study. They had
corresponded regularly until the time when, as she believed, he had
returned to England. From that period she heard no more of him. He was
of a fretful, sensitive temperament, and she feared that she might have
inadvertently done or said something to offend him. However that might
be, he had never written to her again, and after waiting a year she had
married Arthur. I asked when the first estrangement had begun, and found
that the time at which she ceased to hear anything of her first lover
exactly corresponded with the time at which I had been called in to my
mysterious patient at The Two Robins Inn.

A fortnight after that conversation she died. In course of time Arthur
married again. Of l