“In the list of murders which have disgraced the annals of this City for a score of years,” a graybeard of the fourth estate reflects in sending Stokes off to Sing Sing, “none created a greater excitement than the shooting of James Fisk, Jr., by Edward S. Stokes. Both men had their warm partisans and enemies, and both enjoyed a national celebrity—a celebrity of a character not worthy of emulation. On the one side James Fisk, brilliant, unscrupulous, immoral, and debonair, the beau ideal of the fast, shrewd, go-ahead speculator; on the other hand, Edward S. Stokes, reared in affluence, accustomed to have every impulse and wish gratified, every object obtained. Between them Helen Josephine Mansfield Lawlor, the Aspasia who, by the bending of her thumb, like Nero’s wife, Agrippina, brought the conflict of the arena to a fatal conclusion.”

Fisk is gone forever, Stokes for the term of his sentence, and Josie …?

Josie has vanished. Amid the legal wrangling over Stokes’s fate she slipped out of her house on Twenty-third Street and out of the city she turned upside down. Competing rumors put her in contradictory places, but the most plausible indicate an extended European tour. English and some French papers have followed the Fisk murder and the Stokes trials, but Josie’s profile is far lower overseas than in America, and she can hope to disappear among the many other travelers who, in the age of steamships and railroads, are helping launch the modern tourist industry.