I had no idea she did not mean to return to you when she went away from this hotel." Mr.Ransom sprang upright in an agitation the other may have shared, but of which he gave no token.
"Do you mean to say," he asked, "that you cannot tell me where the woman you call your sister is now ?" "No more than you can give me the same necessary information in regard to your wife.

I am waiting like yourself to hear from her--and waiting with as little hope." Had he seen Ransom's hand close convulsively over the pocket in which her few strange words to him were lying, that a slight tinge of sarcasm gave edge to the last four words?
"But this is not like my wife," protested Ransom, hesitating to accuse the other of falsehood, yet evidently doubting him from the bottom of his heart.

"Why deceive us both?
She was never a disingenuous woman." "In childhood she had her incomprehensible moments," observed Hazen, with an ambiguous lift of his shoulders; then, as Ransom made an impatient move, added with steady composure: "I have candidly answered all your questions whether agreeable or otherwise, and the fact that I am as much shocked as yourself by these mad and totally incredible statements of hers about a newly recovered sister should prove to you that she is not following any lead of mine in this dissemination of a bare-faced falsehood." There was truth in this which both Mr.Ransom and Gerridge felt obliged to own.

Yet they were not satisfied, even after Mr.Hazen, almost against Mr.Ransom's will, had established his claims to the relationship he professed, by various well-attested documents he had at hand.

Instinct could not be juggled with, nor could Ransom help feeling that the mystery in which he found himself entangled had been deepened rather than dispelled by the confidences of this new brother-in-law.
"The maze is at its thickest," he remarked as he left a few minutes later with the perplexed Gerridge.