onishment, I might say his anxiety. It was a paragraph about his
wife, an almost incredible one, running thus:

A strange explanation is given of the disappearance of Mrs. Roger
Ransom on her wedding-day. As our readers will remember, she
accompanied her husband to the hotel, but managed to slip away and
leave the house while he still stood at the desk. This act, for which
nothing in her previous conduct has in any way prepared her friends, is
now said to have been due to the shock of hearing, some time during her
wedding-day, that a sister whom she had supposed dead was really alive
and in circumstances of almost degrading poverty. As this sister had
been her own twin the effect upon her mind was very serious. To find
and rescue this sister she left her newly made husband in the
surreptitious manner already recorded in the papers. That she is not
fully herself is shown by her continued secrecy as to her whereabouts.
All that she has been willing to admit to the two persons she has so
far taken into her confidence--her husband and the agent who conducts
her affairs--is that she has found her sister and cannot leave her.
Why, she does not state. The case is certainly a curious one and Mr.
Ransom has the sympathy of all his friends.

Confused, and in a state of mind bordering on frenzy, Mr. Ransom returned
to the hotel and sought refuge in his own room. He put no confidence in
what he had just read; he regarded it as a newspaper story and a great
fake; but she had bid him read it, and this fact in itself was very
disturbing. For how could she have known about it if she had not been
its author, and if she was its author, what purpose had she expected it
to serve?

He was still debating this question when he reached his own room. On the
floor, a little way from the sill, lay a letter. It had been thrust under
the door during his absence. Lifting it in some trepidation, he cast a
glance at its inscription and sank staggering into the nearest chair,
asking himself if he had the courage to open and read it. For the
handwriting, like that of the note handed him in the street, was
Georgian's, and he felt himself in a maze concerning her which made
everything in her connection seem dreamlike and unreal. It was not long,
however, before he had mastered its contents. They were strange enough,
as this transcription of them will show.

You have seen what has happened to me, but you cannot unders