After this it was natural that I should regard Mr. Wentworth with stimulated curiosity. As I met him from day to day, passing through the Common with that same introspective air, there was something in his loneliness which touched me. I wondered that I had not read before in his pale, meditative face some such sad history as Mr. H– had confided to me. I formed the resolution of speaking to him, though with no very lucid purpose. One morning we came face to face at the intersection of two paths. He halted courteously to allow me the precedence.

“Mr. Wentworth,” I began, “I”—

He interrupted me.

“My name, sir,” he said, in an off-hand manner, “is Jones.”

“Jo-Jo-Jones!” I gasped.

“No, not Joseph Jones,” he returned, with a glacial air—“Frederick.”

A dim light, in which the perfidy of my friend H– was becoming discernible, began to break upon my mind.

It will probably be a standing wonder to Mr. Frederick Jones why a strange man accosted him one morning on the Common as “Mr. Wentworth,” and then dashed madly down the nearest foot-path and disappeared in the crowd.

The fact is, I had been duped by Mr. H–, who is a gentleman of literary proclivities, and has, it is whispered, become somewhat demented in brooding over the Great American Novel—not yet hatched, He had actually tried the effect of one of his chapters on me!

My hero, as I subsequently learned, is a commonplace young person, who had some connection, I know not what, with the building of that graceful granite bridge which spans the crooked silver lake in the Public Garden.

When I think of the readiness with which Mr. H– built up his airy fabric on my credulity, I feel half inclined to laugh, though I am deeply mortified at having been the unresisting victim of his Black Art.

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