the keen and agonized expectancy of his look as
he turned and listened for the steps of the officer who followed him.

"From this time on I shall never know whether or not I am alone," was
his final observation as he left the building.

Here is where the matter rests and here, Miss Strange, is where you come
in. The police were for sending an expert alienist into the house; but
agreeing with me, and, in fact, with the doctor himself, that if he were
not already out of his mind, this would certainly make them so, they, at
my earnest intercession, have left the next move to me.

That move as you must by this time understand involves you. You have
advantages for making Mrs. Zabriskie's acquaintance of which I beg you
to avail yourself. As friend or patient, you must win your way into that
home? You must sound to its depths one or both of these two wretched
hearts. Not so much now for any possible reward which may follow the
elucidation of this mystery which has come so near being shelved, but
for pity's sake and the possible settlement of a question which is fast
driving a lovely member of your sex distracted.

May I rely on you? If so--

Various instructions followed, over which Violet mused with a
deprecatory shaking of her head till the little clock struck two. Why
should she, already in a state of secret despondency, intrude herself
into an affair at once so painful and so hopeless?

IV

But by morning her mood changed. The pathos of the situation had seized
upon her in her dreams, and before the day was over, she was to be seen,
as a prospective patient, in Dr. Zabriskie's office. She had a slight
complaint as her excuse, and she made the most of it. That is, at first,
but as the personality of this extraordinary man began to make its
usual impression, she found herself forgetting her own condition in the
intensity of interest she felt in his. Indeed, she had to pull herself
together more than once lest he should suspect the double nature of
her errand, and she actually caught herself at times rejoicing in his
affliction since it left her with only her voice to think of, in her
hated but necessary task of deception.

That she succeeded in this effort, even with one of his nice ear, was
evident from the interested way in which he dilated upon her malady, and
the minute instructions he was careful to give her--the physician being
always uppermost in his strange dual nature, when he was in his office
or at the b