II. That this watering-place should correspond to the one in which Miss
Eleanore Leavenworth was staying at the same time.

III. That they had been seen while there to hold more or less
communication.

IV. That they had both been absent from town, at Lorne one time, long
enough to have gone through the ceremony of marriage at a point twenty
miles or so away.

V. That a Methodist clergyman, who has since died, lived at that time
within a radius of twenty miles of said watering-place.

I next asked myself how I was to establish these acts. Mr. Clavering's
life was as yet too little known o me to offer me any assistance; so,
leaving it for the present, I took up the thread of Eleanore's history,
and found that at the time given me she had been in R----, a fashionable
watering-place in this State. Now, if his was true, and my theory
correct, he must have been there also. To prove this fact, became,
consequently, my first business. I resolved to go to R---- on the
morrow.

But before proceeding in an undertaking of such importance, I considered
it expedient to make such inquiries and collect such facts as the few
hours I had left to work in rendered possible. I went first to the house
of Mr. Gryce.

I found him lying upon a hard sofa, in the bare sitting-room I have
before mentioned, suffering from a severe attack of rheumatism. His
hands were done up in bandages, and his feet incased in multiplied folds
of a dingy red shawl which looked as if it had been through the wars.
Greeting me with a short nod that was both a welcome and an apology,
he devoted a few words to an explanation of his unwonted position; and
then, without further preliminaries, rushed into the subject which was
uppermost in both our minds by inquiring, in a slightly sarcastic way,
if I was very much surprised to find my bird flown when I returned to
the Hoffman House that afternoon.

"I was astonished to find you allowed him to fly at this time,"
I replied. "From the manner in which you requested me to make his
acquaintance, I supposed you considered him an important character in
the tragedy which has just been enacted."

"And what makes you think I don't? Oh, the fact that I let him go off
so easily? That's no proof. I never fiddle with the brakes till the
car starts down-hill. But let that pass for the present; Mr. Clavering,
then, did not explain himself before going?"

"That is a question which I find it exceedingly difficult to answer.
Ham