Gussy and Janet and all the embarrassments connected with them died away from Meredith’s mind as this problem presented itself to his intelligence. Who was it? That curious curtained room--it suddenly flashed upon his mind that it might be a padded room prepared for a lunatic: and this seemed for a moment to throw an illusive light upon the problem, but only for a moment: for he could not think that Mrs. Harwood would permit Vicars to harbor a lunatic in her house, in the near neighborhood of her children; and who could it be whom she could shut up like that in lawless disregard of all rules? Nobody. There was not a madman in the family that he had ever heard of. This last idea, however, seized upon Meredith with greater force as he considered. He remembered the cry which he himself had heard more than once, and which had been put aside with careless explanations as something which was to be heard from time to time from a neighboring house, or from the streets, or a shriek from the railway, or the effect of the wind when it blew in certain directions. He remembered even to have asked, “Is there any private asylum near?” and how it had been suggested by some one that there was somebody out of his mind next door. He had said that in that case he hoped the people next door were aware that it was unlawful to keep a maniac capable of uttering cries like that in an unauthorized house. This forgotten conversation suddenly surged up before him as if it had been laid up in his memory for future use. Was the man mad? Was it Vicars who had him in charge, backed up by his mistress, injudiciously kind, or was it she who was the prime mover and Vicars only the instrument? He puzzled about this insolvable question, turning it a long time over and over in his brain, until at last he came back to the fact that even were this matter solved to his full satisfaction it would leave him as much in the dark as before. For who was the man? This, after all, was the only thing that it was of any importance to know. Meredith made a long excursion as he walked along into all the connections of the Harwood family of whom he had ever heard. He was something of a genealogist, and he had the excellent memory of a country-bred individual for all the cousins, and brothers-in-law, and connections generally of people near home. No; he could think of nobody related to the family on either side who had been mad or who had disappeared or failed to be accounted for. There was nobody. It could not be a mere connection, a far-off friend, who was thus cared for. It must be some one whose life was of importance, for whom secrecy was necessary; whose madness was either to be concealed under a pretence of absence, or who was so near in love that to retain his custody the law was transgressed and defied.