and," she
added, tremulously, "I cannot bear the thought of sending him to any
common lunatic asylum. I learned recently that you sometimes receive
private patients to test their cases before sending them to a public
institution, and that you have frequently effected a cure in critical
cases. Will you take my son and see what you think of his case--what you
can do for him? I shall not mind the cost--I wish to spare nothing, and
I do not wish any one, at least of our friends and acquaintances, to know
that he is under treatment for insanity until you pronounce your verdict.
He seems sane enough upon all other topics, except now and then he
persists in calling himself by some other name, and I know he would be
very sensitive, should he recover, to have his condition known. He does
not even suspect that I am contemplating any such thing, and I shall be
obliged to use strategy in bringing him to you."

Doctor Wesselhoff was evidently very deeply interested in the case; he
had never heard of anything like it before, and all his professional
enthusiasm was aroused.

He spent some time questioning his visitor, and finally decided that he
would receive the young man immediately--to-morrow afternoon Mrs. Walton
might bring him, he said, if she could conveniently arrange to do so.

"I think, perhaps, it will not be best for me to come with him myself,"
the lady said, after considering the matter for some time. "Truly," she
added, with a sad smile, "I almost fear to go out with him, lest he put
his threats into execution and have me arrested. But I think I can
arrange with my sister, Mrs. Vanderbeck, to persuade him to come with
her as if to call upon a friend."

The matter was arranged thus, and madame arose to take her leave, the
physician accompanying her to the door and feeling deep sympathy for the
cultured and attractive woman in her strange affliction.

The next day, about one o'clock--the day following Mona Montague's
attendance at the opera with Ray Palmer, and only a few hours after Mr.
Dinsmore's death, a brilliantly beautiful woman, who might have been
forty-five years of age, entered the handsome store of Amos Palmer & Co.,
diamond merchants and jewelers.

She was exquisitely dressed in an expensive, tailor-made costume of gray
ladies' cloth, with a gray felt bonnet trimmed with the same shade of
velvet as her dress. Her hands were faultlessly gloved, her feet incased
in costly imported boots, and everything abo