A Final Triumph; or, A Lady Bachelor — page 70: what you’re looking at

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

68 A LADY BACHELOR. CHAPTER VII. UNCERTAINTY. DuriIne the week following the departure of George Edicott, the latter’s friend, Laurence Adams, assumed a peculiar rdle. He haunted Eloise, when opportunity per- mitted, like a shadow. He had become deeply interested in the affair, and could not disabuse his mind of the sus- picion that George nursed a secret which led to his other- wise inexplicable conduct. The more he saw of Eloise, the greater became his mystification. He had been seek- ing a reasonable hypothesis whereon to build a solution. He would have been glad to have discovered a reasonable justification for conduct so foreign to what one might ex- pect in a character such as Laurence believed George’s to be. He knew his friend well, knew him through and through; their intimacy had been very close, their confi- dences unreserved. It had been the noble nature of George which had first attracted a friendship, and during its continuance he had only recognized confirmations of his original estimate of the excellent qualities that had first attracted him. The investigation of Laurence, or, rather, his search for an explanation of his friend’s conduct, was prosecuted on certain assumptions. First, he believed that George had been honest in his attentions to Eloise, and had learned to love her. He believed his friend to be an honorable man, and not the cold-blooded fellow his conduct would suggest; and he as fervently believed that some sudden discovery COMMICGOOOKS (C@)