Denton and Haughton Examiner, etc. — 1881-12-24 (Denton, Greater Manchester, England)

CHAPTER LI. THE BND OF LIFE'S DUSAN. So they put her in a private madhouse. " Questionable," said the doctor, shaking his head, whoa they asked him whether she would ever recover. " Questionable ; she is too calm." Walter, true to the last, wrote to Hampton—he knew no one else to address about her—and then he placed her in a private asylum. " Gipsy, poor Gipsy !" But she did not recollect the familiar words which burst involuntarily from his lips. She smiled, and asked him some trivial question; memory of every one, everything had gone. Madness, in mera., had severed the chain linking her to her sorrow. Hampton was in Paris. Thither he had followed Adele, upon receiving a communication from her maid telling him of her illness. For several days she lay in delirium and fever from anxiety and over fatigue, while Hampton could only blame himself for having allowed Geoffery to escape him, so sure was he that the mysterious lodger was no other than him. But where discover him now in this life's game of hide and seek An Englishman in perplexity flies, almost as a rule, to his lawyer; and as life is made up of troubles, that may account for the number we see constantly created to dive into our pockets for fees, before alleviating our woes. Hampton followed the rule. Puzzled beyond endurance, he wrote to his lawyer—or, rather, to Adcla's —telling him briefly the state of the case, and imploring him to discover Geoffery, or his wife would die of grief. The lawyer went a lawyer's way to work—he advertised, and employed an eminent private detective to seek him. Not at all an easy thing in these days of perfection in ornamental hair. A man goes into a hairdresser's as bald and smooth as most newly-born babies are, and comes out with curls and Dundrearies, which would defy his own mother to recognise him. Geoffery had traced Adela to Paris. There he lost her again, while she departed for Switzerland. So he lingered about in the gay capital, feeling sure she must be there somewhere. With the jealous thought uppermost in his mind at work, he watched the hotel principally where Cyrus stopped when in Paris, little dreaming that he was off to King Cheops and the Pyramids. auf the man you want is here," said a friend to Hampton one day, to whom he was detailing (without names) his perplexity, "Gain the police; they'll Gad him for you." He did so, and in twenty-four hours dropped in upon Geoffery, as miserable as a man could be, who was now fully convinced that he had been a fool in all he had done. We deserve punishment when we have done a foolish action. If the penalties imposed upon guilt sometimes produce repentance, so the result of folly ought to make us wise. Geoflery suffered keenly, more especially when Hampton; who spared him nothing, bluntly told him Adele was dying of grief when she returned from Switzerland, all new hope crushed within her, and convinced that he was as dead and stiff as one of the glaciers where she hail been seeking him. "And," concluded he, "if we don't make haste, we shell probably End your wife dead and buried, after the expeditious way they manage these matters in France. I've been seeking for you all day, and here you are at Montmartre, enlivening yourself near the cemetery, and your wife near the Tuileries, almost the other extremity of Paris! I only wonder, from its pleasant and rural associations of murder and plunder, that you have not taken up your residence in the forest of Bondy." Geoffery was hurrying on his paletdt while Hampton indulged in this peroration. Once he stopped indignantly before the speaker to reply, but remembering how well he deserved all the other said, and also the unexampled goodness of the blunt man, he accepted the lesson, and held his peace. Adele, did not know him when he came; but unconsciousness of misery is, perhaps, a saving clause in acute fever. It was so in Adela's case; the mind forgot its sorrow, and the young frame becamehealed. Hampton received Walter's letter just after the reunion of Adele and her husband. Too kind unnecessarily to trouble their 'happiness, he held his peace, subdued his real suffering—for Omi was first in his kind, manly heart—and started for London, promising soon to let Adele hear from him about her poor friend. Adele and GeolTery thought it better to travel abroad awhile, and let the nine days' wonder of hie