The Face of Rosenfeld — page 75: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

68 THE FACH OF ROSHNFEL. gone about in a continual abstraction, and had even been occasionally seen with his umbrella under his arm in fine weather—an unmistakable indication that he was_ be- coming absent-minded. Never before had he met with a case which baffled him so persistently as this. From the hour when he knelt beside her in the snow by the sea-road and had given his opinion that it was a ‘‘ very serious matter,” the patient had never been wholly out of hismind. It made him angry to think that the informa- tion contained in this first statement of his impressions of the case, as he bent over Ellen Maxey’s shoulder and saw the white face looking up by the light of the lantern, was about the sum and substance of all he had been able to learn since; but such was the fact. What more could he say with any certainty to-day than this? ‘To be sure, it had puzzled older men than he, but that was small consolation to a mind like Lamar’s. The greater the obstacles the more determined he became to overcomé them. | ‘««ither I will be the death of this problem or it will be the death of me,” he said to himself; and with this conviction he had set to work to save his own life. He saw the patient so often that he photographed every look and motion she was accustomed to make upon his mind. Not the movement of a muscle, not the twitch- ing of an eyelid, escaped him. He went about studying overy one of these apparent trivialities and trying to account for it. Just as Maxey treasured up every scrap of evidence which promised to throw any light on the great double mystery which entirely nonplussed the police, so the physician, constituting himself a medical detective, looked upon the yarious symptoms of the girl’s condition