Cirrus@Austlit

Mystery surrounding a gentleman's voluntary amputation of his hand in Paris is discovered to be linked to a false identity assumed in London. The narrator, a medical student in Paris, recounts his Italian fellow student's amputation of the hand which he refused to remove. Later, a chance encounter with a suicidal young woman near Hampstead Heath where his practice was, a glimpse of her with the amuptee, and a recognition of him in the role of a rich English colonel, survivor of the Chili-Peruvian war and fiancee of an aristocratic woman, reveal a villainous imposture ... (PB)