ound, so I strove to secure our joy by the seeming death of Georgian
and a new life as her twin. You do not understand; you cannot. You have
no measure with which to gauge such men as my brother. But it will be
given you. There is no hope now. The weakness of a moment has undone us."

Ransom must have heard her, after events proved that he did, but he gave
no token of it. The visions that were whirling through his mind still
held it engrossed. He saw her, not as she stood before him now, trembling
and appealing, but as she had looked to him in the hall that first night,
as she had looked to him down by the mill-stream, as she had looked when
she told her story as Anitra, and later when she had faced the landlady
as Georgian, and the confusion of it all left no room in his conscience
for any other impression. But Mr. Harper, though surprised as he had
never been before in all his professional career, lost himself in no such
abyss. With the freedom which long-delayed insight into the truth gives
to a man of his positive nature and training, he left speculation and all
endeavor to reconcile events with her declaration, and plunged at once to
the obvious question of the moment.

Fixing his keen gaze on Hazen, he observed very quietly, but with an
underlying note of sarcasm:

"If this lady is your sister, Georgian Ransom, and there is no Anitra
save the fast fading memory of the child commemorated in your family's
monument, then your statement as to the body you saw under the ledge was
false?"

The answer came deliberately, unaffected both by the manner of the
accusation or by the accusation itself.

"Perfectly so," said he, "I saw no body. Perhaps my description would
have been less vivid if I had. My intention you know. This woman had
deceived me to the point of making me believe that she was indeed Anitra,
the twin, and not my millionaire sister, and Georgian's fortune being
necessary to her heir, I wished to cut short the law's delay by an
apparent identification. I never doubted from the moment this woman faced
with such well-played ignorance the mark of great meaning we had placed
upon her door, that Georgian was in the river, as you all believed. Why
then not give her a positive resting-place, since this would smooth out
all difficulties and hasten the very end for which she had apparently
sacrificed herself."

If there was any irony in his heart, his tongue did not show it. Indeed
his manner betrayed little. Im