"Never heard of her. Why? Griswold?"
I did not sleep that night. For the first time my faith in Florence Campbell wavered. Up to that time I had blamed her husband for everything. I had woven around her a web of plausible circumstances which made her the unwilling victim of a designing villain—an expert forger, no doubt, who used her, without her own knowledge, as a decoy—a man of whom she was both ashamed and afraid, but from whom she could not escape.
But how was all that to be reconciled with this revelation? Griswold did not know her. How about his introduction and that "sulph. 12"? I looked through my desk for Griswold's note. It was certainly his handwriting; but I noticed, for the first time, that it did not mention her name.
Perhaps this was a loop-hole through which I might bring my fair patient—in whom I was beginning to fear I had taken too deep an interest—without discredit to herself.
Might she not have changed her name since Griswold treated her? I determined to give her the benefit of this doubt until I could be sure that it had no foundation.
I felt relieved by this respite, and, heartily ashamed of the unjust suspicion of the moment before, I gave no hint of it in the letter I now wrote Griswold, describing the lady, and in which I enclosed his letter of introduction to me.
The next few days I went about my practice in a dream, and it was no doubt due to fortuitous circumstances rather than to my skill that several of my patients still live to tell the tale of their suffering and of my phenomenal ability to cope with disease in all its malignant power.
V.
In due time Griswold's letter came. I went into my office to read it. I told myself that I had no fears for the good name of Florence Campbell. I knew that some explanation would be made that would confirm me in my opinion of her; but, for all that, I locked the door, and my hand was less steady than I liked to see it, as I tore the end of the envelope.