A letter to a friend and fellow-attorney in the city where the mother had died brought this reply: The man I wanted to find had been a general practitioner there for some years; he had had a very large practice and the liking and respect of the community; but both had fallen away from him from two very odd causes; one, that he had suddenly become exceedingly untrustworthy and unreliable, in fact, a phenomenal and outrageous liar; and the other, that he had unaccountably taken to the habitual wearing on every possible or impossible occasion, professional or social, of white kid gloves or long white gauntlets, bringing these ghostly hands to the bedside of patients, or hovering with them over the operating-table. It began to be noised abroad that Dr. Bently, which was his name, was unsound in his mind, was suffering from some dreadful, contagious disease which had broken out in his hands, and that the truth was not in him. My informant added that shortly after the death of Mrs. Johnstone, my small client’s mother, the doctor had taken himself, his gauntlets and his marvelous mendacity to New York, but that his present whereabouts were unknown to the writer. The detective agency in New York, of which I next inquired, sent me word that there was no such name as Bernard Brice Bently in the directory or in any way on record as a physician or surgeon in that city. All this took time, and, meanwhile, I had advertised vainly in prominent papers all over the country and had had an agent interview many of the doctor’s old acquaintances. The man had disappeared, and within a very narrow limit of time the will would be admitted to probate. Just at this time another legal matter required my presence in New York, and, when I reached there, the engrossing nature of my business drove most other matters out of my head. After several days of close and confining work, I finished taking the depositions I needed, and purposed to return home that evening. It occurred to me that a pleasant way of spending my remaining hours in town would be to take a stroll through Central Park, which I had not seen in years—not, in fact, since I had been a student in Columbia Law School. I walked from the Fifty-ninth Street entrance as far as the Museum, which is about opposite Eighty-second Street, and had sat down to rest near the obelisk. It was a magnificent late spring day, and I was lazily enjoying the beauty of the place and watching the passing show, when a man on the next bench attracted my attention by springing to his feet and gazing eagerly and fiercely beyond me and up the drive. If ever ferocious desire and intent to kill were written on a human face it was on his.