What conclusion was I to draw from this startling disclosure? My father, returning to England in the Germanic, had never been heard of either at his house of business or at his home? What, then, had become of him? What motive had he for mysterious concealment? Arguing, as I believed to be the case when I received the first letter from him in New York, that he had discovered the infamous character of the woman he had made his wife, there _was_ perhaps a motive for his not living in the house to which he had brought her; but it was surely reasonable to expect that his return would be known at his place of business. I reflected upon the nature and character of my father's wife, and upon the character of her scheming lover, Mr. Pelham; I subjected them to a mental analysis of the most searching kind, and I could arrive at but one conclusion--Foul Play! Judging from what had occurred between them and my poor friend, Sydney Campbell, there was no plot too treacherous for them to engage in, no scheme too wicked for them to devise and carry out. Foul Play rose before me in a thousand hideous shapes, until in its many-sided mental guise it became a conviction so strong that I did not pause to doubt it. Then arose another phase of the affair. If there had been Foul Play with my father, was it not reasonable to suppose that I, also, had been made the victim of clever tricksters? This, too, in a vague inexplicable way, became a conviction. A number of conflicting circumstances at once occurred to me in confirmation. The advertisement in the _New York Herald_ desiring me to proceed to Chicago attached itself to the statement of the manager of the hotel at which my father stopped that Mr. Holdfast had not been in Chicago. The second advertisement in the "Personal" column of the _Herald_ desiring me to advertise the name of the ship I took passage in from New York to Liverpool, attached itself to the circumstance that my father's letter, handed to me by the hotel manager, contained no wish to know what ship I sailed in. And upon this came the thought that at the time this last "Personal," which I supposed was inserted by my father, appeared in the columns of the _Herald_, my father was on the Atlantic. Fool that I was to act without deliberation, to believe without questioning. Last of all, the conflicting tone of the two letters I received from my father, the one in New York, which was undoubtedly genuine, and the one from the Liverpool post office, which may have been forged!--This completed it. Conviction seemed added to conviction, confirmation to confirmation, doubt to doubt--although every point in the evidence was circumstantial, and, nothing as yet could be distinctly proved. How I regretted that I had not kept the letters! When I received the last in Liverpool, I tore up, in a fury of indignation, every letter my father had written to me, and had therefore no writing of his in my possession by which I could compare and judge.