The lawyer, darting a keen glance at the speaker, softly shook his head.

“I am not thinking of Miss Hazen,” said he.  “I’m wondering how far the proof he has obtained will go.”  He paused, listening, then made a gesture towards the hall.  “There’s some one there,” he whispered.

Ransom rose, and with a quick turn of the wrist pulled open the door.

A man was standing on the threshold, a ghastly figure before which Ransom involuntarily stepped back.

“Hazen!” he cried; then, as the other tottered, he sprang forward again and, reaching out his hand to steady him, drew him in with the remark, “We were expecting a summons from you.  We are happy that you find yourself able to come to us.”

“The coroner has just gone.  The doctors I dismissed.  I have something to say to you—­to both of you,” he added as he caught sight of Mr. Harper.

Entering slowly, he sat down in the chair proffered him by the lawyer.  There was something strange in his air, a quiet automaton-like quality which attracted the latter’s notice and led him to watch him very closely.  Ransom was busy with the door, which the strong west wind blowing through the hall made difficult to close.

“I—­” The one word uttered, Hazen seemed to forget himself.  Sitting quite still, he gazed straight before him at the open window.  There was little to be seen there but the swaying boughs of the huge tree, but his gaze never left those tossing limbs, and his sentence hung suspended till the movement made by Ransom recrossing the room roused him, and he went on.

“I have made the plunge, gentlemen, and fortune favored me.  I—­” here his voice failed him again, but realizing the fact more quickly than before, he shook off his apathy, and facing the two men, who awaited his slow words with inconceivable excitement, continued with sudden concentration upon his subject, “I saw what I went to see—­poor Georgian’s body.  I have satisfied the coroner of this fact.  The little bag I tore from her side proves her identity beyond a doubt.  You saw it, Mr. Harper.  They tell me that you recognized it at once as the same you saw in her hand in the stage-coach.  But if you had not, the initials on it are unmistakable, G. Q. H., Georgian Quinlan Hazen.  Auchincloss will get his money, and soon, will he not?  Answer me plainly, Harper.  Such an experience merits some reward.  You will not make difficulties?”

“I?” The lawyer’s query had a strange ring to it.  He glanced from Hazen to Ransom, and from Ransom back to Hazen, whose features had now become more composed, though they still retained their remarkable pallor.

“If the proof is positive,” he then went on, “you assuredly can trust both my client and myself to remember our promise to you.”

“The coroner, you say, is satisfied?”

“Yes, with the proof and my sworn statement.  He is obliged to be.  No one else, least of all himself, feels any desire to go down to that whirling eddy for confirmation of my story.  And they are wise.  I do not think that any man with less experience than myself could sound the depths of that vortex and come up alive.  The noise—­the swirl—­the sense of being sucked down—­down in ever-increasing fury—­but my purpose kept the life in me.  I was determined not to yield, not to faint, till I had seen—­and proved—­”