at kind of a woman did he make her out to be? Delicate?
Pale?"

"Sir, he had not read the service for so lovely a bride in years. Very
slight, almost fragile, but beautiful, and with a delicate bloom which
showed her to be in better health than one would judge from her dainty
figure. It was a private wedding, sir, celebrated in a hotel parlor; but
her father was with her----"

"Her father?" Mr. Gryce's theory received its first shock. Then the old
man who had laughed on leaving Mr. Adams's house was not the father to
whom those few lines in Mr. Adams's handwriting were addressed. Or this
young woman was not the person referred to in those lines.

"Is there anything wrong about that?" inquired Sweetwater.

Mr. Gryce became impassive again.

"No; I had not expected his attendance at the wedding; that is all."

"Sorry, sir, but there is no doubt about his having been there. The
bridegroom----"

"Yes, tell me about the bridegroom."

"Was the very man you described to me as leaving Mr. Adams's house with
her. Tall, finely developed, with a grand air and gentlemanly manners.
Even his clothes correspond with what you told me to expect: a checked
suit, brown in color, and of the latest cut. Oh, he is the man!"

Mr. Gryce, with a suddenly developed interest in the lid of his
inkstand, recalled the lines which Mr. Adams had written immediately
before his death, and found himself wholly at sea. How reconcile facts
so diametrically opposed? What allusion could there be in these lines to
the new-made bride of another man? They read, rather, as if she were his
own bride, as witness:

I return your daughter to you. She is here. Neither she nor you
will ever see me again. Remember Evelyn!

AMOS'S SON.

There must be something wrong. Sweetwater must have been led astray by a
series of extraordinary coincidences. Dropping the lid of the inkstand
in a way to make the young man smile, he looked up.

"I'm afraid it's been a fool chase, Sweetwater. The facts you relate in
regard to this couple, the fact of their having been married at all,
tally so little with what we have been led to expect from certain other
evidences which have come in----"

"Pardon me, sir, but will you hear me out? At the Imperial, where they
were married, I learned that the father and daughter had registered as
coming from a small place in Pennsylvania; but I could learn nothing in
regard to the bridegroom. He had not appeared on the sce