'It is Mark Wylder's writing--I'll swear to it. What on earth _can_ he mean? He can't possibly want to confuse us upon dates, as well as places, because that would simply render his letters, for purposes of business, nugatory, and there are many things he wishes attended to.' Jos. Larkin rose from his desk, ruminating, and went to the window, and placed the letter against the pane. I don't think he had any definite motive in doing this, but something struck him that he had not remarked before. There was something different in the quality of the ink that wrote the number of the date, 28th, from that used in the rest of the letter. 'What can that mean?' muttered Larkin, with a sort of gasp at his discovery; and shading his eyes with his hand, he scrutinised the numerals--'28th,' again;--'a totally different ink! He took the previous letter, frowned on it fiercely from his rat-like eyes, and then with an ejaculation, as like an oath as so good a man could utter, he exclaimed, 'I have it!' Then came a pause, and he said-- 'Both alike!--blanks left when the letters were written, and the dates filled in afterward--_not_ the same hand I _think_--no, _not_ the same--_positively_ a different hand.' Then Jos. Larkin examined these mysterious epistles once more. 'There may be something in what Larcom said--a very great deal, possibly. If he was shut up somewhere they could make him write a set of these letters off at a sitting, and send them from place to place to be posted, to make us think he was travelling, and prevent our finding where they keep him. Here it is plain there was a slip in posting the wrong one first.' Trepanned, kidnapped, hid away in the crypts of some remote mad-house--reduced to submission by privation and misery--a case as desperate as that of a prisoner in the Inquisition. What could be the motive for this elaborate and hideous fraud? Would it not be a more convenient course, as well as more merciful to put him to death? The crime would hardly be greater. Why should he be retained in that ghastly existence?