“It is a singular mania, truly,” said the physician, who had been listening with the deepest interest to his companion’s recital.  “I think I never have met with anything exactly like it before in all my experience.  How old is your son, Mrs. Walter?”

“Twenty-four years,” the woman replied, with a heavy sigh; “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 about her apparel bespoke her a favorite of wealth and luxury.

Her appearance was the more marked from the fact that her hair was a deep, rich red, and curled about her fair forehead in lovely natural curls, while she wore over her face a spotted black lace veil, which, however, did not quite conceal some suspicious wrinkles and “crow’s-feet,” if that had been her object in wearing it.