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 A DOUBLE MARRIAGE

PART I

CHAPTER I

" DEAREST.—When you read this letter, I shall have gone—have disappeared from your life, and you and your mother, every one, will have the right to say I have behaved like a blackguard. I know that I have; I know that the world will have a right to blame me; and I know that you will never be able to forgive me. Only I ask you to try and forget me. I told you when I married that I was peculiar, unfit for married life, unfit to link my life with any girl's. I have tried—ah, you don't know, Lucille, how I have tried—to be a good husband, to learn to take an interest in small things, in the small, pretty little domesticites, which you make so graceful. I shall miss you, I know how I shall miss you, your sweet face, your pretty ways, but I feel that presently you will be happier, meet with some one who is far more worthy of you than I am. Something calls me always away to further corners of the earth. I am restless, imbued, as it were, with the detective spirit—the detective spirit which impels me to discover the secrets of Nature, to unravel whe 1