She saw the maddening nature of his confusion and, springing to him, fell on her knees with the imploring cry: 

“Patience!  Do not try to think—­I will tell you.  It can all be said in a word.  I was bound to this brother of mine, to do his bidding, to follow his fortunes through life, and up to death, by promises and oaths to which those uttered by me at the marriage altar were but toys and empty air.  Anitra, or the dream sister my misery took from the dead, was not so bound, 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.  Immobility had again replaced all tokens of anger, and immobility which only yielded now and then to a slight contortion more expressive of physical pain than of mental agitation.  Yet in Georgian’s eyes he had lost none of his formidable qualities, for the dismay with which she followed his words grew as she listened, and reached its height as he added in final explanation: