Oswald Langdon

Copyrighted in 1900 and issued under the pen name Carson Jay Lee, this melodrama opens in New York, where a fugitive flinches at a newsboy shouting news of a drowned girl, then doubles back to England. Oswald Langdon, a rector’s son and Oxford graduate of twenty-five, is hurt when a storm drops a tree across his road and is taken in at Northfield by Sir Donald Randolph, whose daughter Esther he comes to love. Another guest, Alice Webster, is the target of Pierre Lanier’s fraudulent claim on her father’s estate and of his son Paul’s unwanted courtship. Paul knifes them both on the Thames bank one night. Oswald survives, assumes he will be blamed for her murder, and runs to India, beginning a pursuit that reaches Bombay, the Himalayas, Paris and New York as Paul’s guilt hardens into madness.