'I have indeed,' replied Carey; 'and though the victim, whose name I believe was Foster, was personally unknown to me, the fact of his being a stranger, apparently without friends or connections at the scene of the assassination, seems to render the tragedy doubly dreadful.'

'That he had no friends or relatives at the scene of the murder is, I have no doubt, perfectly true,' said Bryan Duval; 'but I have too much reason to believe, not merely that his name was not Foster, but, from what we now learn, that he was an intimate friend of yours.'

'Good God!' cried Thornton Carey, upon whom a light suddenly broke. 'And you say that Helen Griswold is also deeply interested in the matter? You cannot imagine for an instant--' and he stopped, for his voice suddenly failed him.

'I do not merely imagine,' said Bryan Duval, speaking deliberately, 'but in my own mind I no longer entertain any doubt that the man, the news of whose murder has caused such a shock in New York society, was Mr. Griswold, the husband of the lady whom you went to see this morning.'

'It is too terrible,' said Thornton Carey, covering his face with his hands. 'You seem to speak with certainty. Mr. Griswold was in Europe--might have been in Liverpool at the very time--and yet why this assumption of a false name?'

'That is exactly what we want you to explain to us,' said Bryan quickly; 'but before you attempt to do so, let me explain to you as shortly as possible the story of my acquaintance with Griswold, and the reason I have for coming to this sad conclusion.'

Then Bryan Duval succinctly, and in as few words as possible, sketched the story of their acquaintance with Griswold in London--narrated the particulars of the Richmond dinner, the conversation which the unfortunate man had had with Miss Montressor, the devoted manner in which he had spoken of his wife, and in which he had exhibited her portrait set in the watch; the melancholy which had overcome him at Liverpool at the knowledge that they were about to proceed to New York, while his business must detain him some little time longer in England; told him, in fact, the whole story, without concealment or curtailment, down to Miss Montressor's recognition of the lady in the stalls on the previous evening as the original of the portrait which the so-called Mr. Foster had shown her, and the terrible dread which had then fallen upon her and Duval, that the murdered man was Mr. Griswold, who, for some object of his own unknown to them, had chosen, while away from home, to pass under an assumed name.

'But what that object was,' said Bryan Duval, in conclusion, 'we want you to tell us.'

After a pause of a few minutes, during which he had remained buried in abstraction, Thornton Carey spoke. 'You have given me a task which I am quite unable to fulfil,' he said, shaking his head. 'There is probably no man in the world who understands so little of business, by which I mean commercial matters, as myself. Mr. Griswold never spoke to me about them, and if he had I should have been unable to understand them; and, fond of me as I am sure he was, I should have been one of the last persons in the world to whom he would have made any business confidence.'

'You believe, then,' said Bryan Duval, 'that this taking of an assumed name was really done for business purposes?'