The pretty Miss Bristowe was certainly an enigma.

In that dingy consulting-room in the Walworth Road I often sat during the days that followed, musing over that curious and fruitless journey. I felt rather piqued than disappointed, for to put it bluntly I had been fooled, and left to pay nearly a sovereign to a cabman.

Her parting words to me: “Perhaps one day you will learn the real reason of this decision,” seemed ominous ones, while her agitation was strange in such circumstances. She parted from me so hastily that it seemed almost as though she held me in fear. But why? I am sure I acted towards her with all the gallantry in my rather rough nature. No; the more I thought over it the more remarkable seemed the incident.

But a few days later I discovered yet a stranger circumstance. In order to find out something regarding my pretty companion on that long cab drive, I wrote to Dr. Whitworth at Bude, telling him that she had called, and inquiring the nature of her brother’s complaint. To this I received a brief note saying that he had never heard of “Miss Bristowe” in his life.

Then the truth was rudely forced upon me that the woman who had held me fascinated by her beauty was actually an impostor.

What, however, could have been her object in inducing me to accompany her upon such a vain errand? Doctors see some queer things and meet with strange adventures in the course of their practice, but surely her motive in fooling me was utterly unintelligible.

Through the remaining fortnight I continued to treat the crowd of poor suffering humanity that seemed to greet me ever in the waiting-room; for Whitworth was a kindly man, hence all the poor came to him. Night after night I sat listening to the ills of costermongers and their wives, labourers, factory hands, cabmen, tram-men, and all that hard-working class that makes up lower London “over the water.” Sometimes they told me their symptoms with quaint directness, using scientific terms wrongly or atrociously pronounced—the result of School Board education in elementary physiology, I suppose. But, as in every neighbourhood of that class, drink was accountable for, or aggravated, at least two-thirds of the cases that I saw. Surely it would open the eyes of the social reformer or the temperance advocate if he spent one evening in the consulting-room of a dispensary in lower London.

At last Whitworth returned, fresh and bronzed, from the Cornish coast, and as I sat handing back to him the keys of the place and receiving a cheque for my services, I mentioned the subject of Miss Bristowe.

“Ah!” he laughed, “what did you mean by that letter? I don’t know any such person, nor even anyone who lives at Blackheath.”

“And she said that you had attended her brother for nearly two years for some internal ailment. She came here one night to fetch you. I told her you were away, and after some persuasion she allowed me to accompany her. Then, when we got to Blackheath, she suddenly changed her mind and sent me back.”

“You never saw the brother?”

“Never went to the house. She wouldn’t let me.”

“But you yourself suggested going with her, you say?”

“Yes,” I replied, “I did.”

“Pretty?”

“Very much so.”

“And you were struck with her, eh?” he laughed, for he was a prosaic married man with a couple of children.

“Just a trifle,” I admitted.

“Well,” he said, “the girl possibly saw that you were gone on her, so she had a lark with you. You paid her cab home, and she had no objection.”

“But her story was so plausible.”

“Every woman can be plausible when she pleases,” he said. “But are you sure she asked for me?”

“Quite certain. She first inquired for you, telling me that you were an old friend.”

He laughed heartily at what he termed the woman’s audacity; then, after some further discussion of the subject, we dropped it as one of those little mysteries of life that are beyond solution.

On relinquishing my position at the dispensary I wandered heedlessly hither and thither in London. The weather was still hot, more oppressive even than I had felt it at Naples or at Leghorn, and all seemed dull because my friends were away in the country or at the seaside. Through the Lancet I was offered a three months’ engagement as assistant to a doctor in Northumberland, but I declined it, as it was too far from London. Somehow I felt it necessary, for the elucidation of the mystery of the Seahorse, to remain in town—why I cannot tell.

One day in response to a note, I called upon Macfarlane, the specialist in lunacy, and found him seated in his consulting-room, a fine apartment furnished in old oak, of which he was an ardent collector, and surrounded by a number of fine old clocks of various periods.

“Well, Pickering,” he exclaimed cheerily, rising to greet me, “I’ve got some news for you about your—what shall we call him—foundling, eh?”

“That’s a good description,” I laughed. “Captain Seal used to call him ‘Old Mister Mystery.’ But what is the news?”

“Well, he’s taken a decided turn for the better. I see him every day, and although at first he was bitterly hostile towards me because I wouldn’t allow him to wear his sword, he has now become quite mild and tractable. And what’s more, he’s taken to writing, which is one of the best signs of impending recovery that we could have. Here are some of his efforts,” he added, taking from a drawer a quantity of scraps of paper, from half-sheets of foolscap to bits torn from newspapers, and placing them before me. “I don’t suppose you can make anything more out of them than I can. His brain is clearing, but is not yet rightly balanced. Now and then his ideas run in the direction of a design made up of creepy-looking demons and imps. There’s no doubt about it, that whoever he is, he’s a man of some talent. Did you see what was in the Telegraph the other day?”

“I saw a distorted story about the Seahorse,&............