“Not while your eye’s on him.  And your eye won’t leave him as long as you have confidence in the reward I’ve promised you.”

“Perhaps not; but you take the life out of me.  Last night you were too hot; this morning you are too cold.  But it’s not for me to complain.  You know where to find me when you want me.”  And without more ado the detective went out.

Mr. Ransom remained alone and in no enviable frame of mind.  He was distrustful of himself, distrustful of the man who had made all this trouble, and distrustful of her, though he would not acknowledge it.  Every baser instinct in him drove him to the meeting he declined.  To see the man—­to force from him the truth, seemed the only rational thing to do.  But the final words of his wife’s letter stood in his way.  She had advised patience.  If patience would clear the situation and bring him the result he so ardently desired, then he would be patient—­that is, for a day; he did not promise to wait longer.  Yes, he would give her a day.  That was time enough for a man suffering on the rack of such an intolerable suspense—­one day.

But even that day did not pass without breaks in his mood and more than one walk in the direction of the St. Denis Hotel.  If Gerridge’s eye was on him as well as on the special object of his surveillance, he must have smiled, more than once, at the restless flittings of his client about the forbidden spot.  In the evening it was the same, but the next morning he remained steadfastly at his hotel.  He had laid out his future course in these words:  “I will extend the time to three days; then if I do not hear from her I will get that wry-necked fellow by the throat and twist an explanation from him.”  But the three days passed and he found the situation unchanged.  Then he set as his limit the end of the week, but before the full time had elapsed he was advised by Gerridge that he himself was being followed in his turn by a couple of private detectives; and while still under the agitation of this discovery was further disconcerted by having the following communication thrust into his hand in the open street by a young woman who succeeded in losing herself in the crowd before he had got so much as a good look at her.

You can judge of his amazement as he read the few lines it contained.

   Read the papers to-night and forget the stranger at the St. Denis.

That was all.  But the writing was hers.  The hours passed slowly till the papers were cried in the street.  What Mr. Ransom read in them increased his astonishment, I might say his anxiety.  It was a paragraph about his wife, an almost incredible one, running thus: