“Action?” repeated Ransom, with quick suspicion and a confused rush of contradictory visions in his mind.  “What do you mean by that?”

Hazen covered his chin with his hand.

“I will try and explain,” he replied.  “If I am abrupt in my language, it is owing to the exigencies of the case.  I have no time to waste and no disposition to whitewash a rough piece of work.  To speak to the point, I have an intense interest in my sister Georgian.  I have little or none in my sister Anitra.  Georgian’s intelligence, good-will, and command of money would be of inestimable benefit to me.  Anitra, on the contrary, could be nothing but a burden, unless—­” here he cast a very sharp glance at Ransom—­“unless Georgian should have been sufficiently considerate to leave her a good share of her fortune in the will you say she made just before her disappearance and supposed death.”

“That I can say nothing about,” rejoined Ransom in answer to this feeler.  “The will is in the hands of her lawyer, but if it will help your argument any we will suppose that she left her sister to the care of her friends without any especial provision for her in the way of money.”

The steady fingers clutching the scarred neck loosed their grip to wave this supposition aside.

“A hardly supposable case,” was the cold comment with which he supplemented this disclaimer; “but one which would make the girl a burden indeed; a burden which for many reasons I could not assume.”  Here he struck himself sharply on the neck, with the first display of passion he had shown.  “My advantages are not such as to make it easy for me to support myself.  It would be simply impossible for me to undertake the care of any girl, least of all of one with a manifest infirmity.”

“Anitra will prosper without your care,” replied Ransom, overlooking the heartlessness of the man in the mad, unaccountable sense of relief with which he listened to his withdrawal from concerns for which he showed so little sympathy.  “There are others who will be glad to do all that can be done for Georgian’s forsaken sister.”

“Yes.  That is all right, but—­” Here Hazen squared himself across the top of the table before which he had been sitting; “I must be made sure that the facts have been rightly represented to me and that the girl now in this house is Georgian’s deserted sister.  I’m not yet satisfied that she is, and I must be convinced not only on this point but on many others, before this day is over.  Business of great importance calls me back to the city and, it may be, out of the country.  I may never be able to spend another day on purely personal affairs, so this one must tell.  I have a scheme (it is a very simple one) which, if carried out as I have planned, will satisfy me as nothing else will as to the identity of the girl we will call, from lack of positive knowledge, Anitra.  Will you help me in its furtherance?  It lies with you to do so.”