excite me. I had not much faith anyway that I was to re-establish
former relations with it, and what little faith I had was all but
destroyed on the morning of August 30th, 1902, when a short message,
written on a slip of paper, reached me by the hand of an attendant. It
informed me that my conservator would call that afternoon. I thought it
a lie. I felt that any brother of mine would have taken the pains to
send a letter in reply to the first I had written him in over two
years. The thought that there had not been time for him to do so and
that this message must have arrived by telephone did not then occur to
me. What I believed was that my own letter had been confiscated. I
asked one of the doctors to swear on his honor that it really was my
own brother who was coming to see me. This he did. But abnormal
suspicion robbed all men in my sight of whatever honor they may have
had, and I was not fully reassured.

In the afternoon, as usual, the patients were taken out of doors, I
among them. I wandered about the lawn and cast frequent and expectant
glances toward the gate, through which I believed my anticipated
visitor would soon pass. In less than an hour he appeared. I first
caught sight of him about three hundred feet away, and, impelled more
by curiosity than hope, I advanced to meet him. "I wonder what the lie
will be this time," was the gist of my thoughts.

The person approaching me was indeed the counterpart of my brother as I
remembered him. Yet he was no more my brother than he had been at any
time during the preceding two years. He was still a detective. Such he
was when I shook his hand. As soon as that ceremony was over, he drew
forth a leather pocketbook. I instantly recognized it as one I myself
had carried for several years prior to the time I was taken ill in
1900. It was from this that he took my recent letter.