I must confess, in spite of my affection for Carriston, I felt inclined to rebel against the course which matters were taking. I was a matter-of-fact[261] medical man; doing my work to the best of my ability and anxious when that work was done that my hours of leisure should be as free from worry and care as possible. With Carriston’s several disturbing elements entered into my quiet life.  
Let Ralph Carriston be guilty or innocent of the extraordinary crime which his cousin laid at his door, I felt that he was anxious to obtain possession of the supposed lunatic’s person. It would suit his purposes for his cousin to be proved mad. I did not believe that even if the capture was legally effected Carriston’s liberation would be a matter of great difficulty so long as he remained in his present state of mind; so long as I, a doctor of some , could go into the witness-box and swear to his . But my old was always with me—the dread that any further shock would overturn the balance of his sensitive mind.
 
So it was that every hour that Carriston was out of my sight was with anxiety. If Ralph Carriston was really as unscrupulous as my friend supposed; if he had really, as seemed almost probable, suborned our agent; he might by some trick obtain the needful certificate, and some day I should come home and find Carriston had been removed. In such a case I foresaw great trouble and .
 
Besides, after all that had occurred, it was as much as I could do to believe that Carriston was not mad. Any doctor who knew what I knew would have given the verdict against him.
 
After dismissing his visions and hallucinations with the contempt which they deserved, the fact of a man who was madly, in love with a woman, and who believed that she had been and[262] was still kept in restraint, sitting down quietly, and letting day after day pass without making an effort toward finding her, was in itself prima facie evidence of . A man would at once have set all the engines of detection at work.
 
I felt that if once Ralph Carriston obtained possession of him he could make out a strong case in his own favor. First of all, the proposed marriage out of the defendant’s own sphere of life; the passing under a false name; the ridiculous, or ridiculous, made against his ; the murderous threats; the of his own paid agent who brought him a report which might not seem at all untrue to any one who knew not Madeline Rowan. Leaving out the question what might be from me in cross-examination, Ralph Carriston had a strong case, and I knew that, once in his power, my friend might possibly be to pass years, if not his whole life, under restraint. So I was anxious—very anxious.
 
And I felt an anxiety, scarcely second to that which prevailed on Carriston’s account, as to the fate of Madeline. Granting for sake of argument that Carriston’s absurd conviction that no bodily harm had as yet been done her, was true, I felt sure that she with her scarcely less sensitive nature must feel the separation from her lover as much as he himself felt the separation from her. Once or twice I tried to comfort myself with cynicism—tried to persuade myself that a young woman could not in our days be spirited away—that she had gone by her own free-will—that there was a man who had at the eleventh hour her affections from Carriston. But I could not bring myself[263] to believe this. So I was placed between the horns of a .
 
If Madeline had not fled of her own free-will, some one must have taken her away, and if so our agent’s report was a coined one, and, if a coined one, issued at Ralph’s instance; therefore Ralph must be the prime actor in the mystery.
 
But in sober moments such a seemed an utter .
 
Although I have said that Carriston was doing nothing toward clearing up the mystery, I wronged him in so saying. After his own way he was at work. At such work too! I really lost all patience with him.
 
He shut himself up in his room, out of which he scarcely stirred for three days. By that time he had completed a large and beautiful drawing of his imaginary man. This he took to a well-known photographer’s, and ordered several hundred small photographs of it, to be prepared as soon as possible. The minute description which he had given me of his fanciful creation was printed at the foot of each copy. As soon as the first of these precious photograph............