engagement came to be broken off. She replied that it had not
been broken off, but that it had died out in a very mysterious
way. The person to whom she was engaged--her first love, she
called him--was very poor, and there was no immediate prospect of
their being married. He followed my profession, and went abroad
to study. They had corresponded regularly until the time when, as
she believed, he had returned to England. From that period she
heard no more of him. He was of a fretful, sensitive temperament,
and she feared that she might have inadvertently done or said
something to offend him. However that might be, he had never
written to her again, and after waiting a year she had married
Arthur. I asked when the first estrangement had begun, and found
that the time at which she ceased to hear anything of her first
lover exactly corresponded with the time at which I had been
called in to my mysterious patient at The Two Robins Inn.

A fortnight after that conversation she died. In course of time
Arthur married again. Of late years he has lived principally in
London, and I have seen little or nothing of him.

I have some years to pass over before I can approach to anything
like a conclusion of this fragmentary narrative. And even when
that later period is reached, the little that I have to say will
not occupy your attention for more than a few minutes.

One rainy autumn evening, while I was still practicing as a
country doctor, I was sitting alone, thinking over a case then
under my charge, which sorely perplexed me, when I heard a low
knock at the door of my room.