MAN OF MANY SECRETS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 216, 31 January 1913, Page 6

MAN OF MANY SECRETS.

XEW LIGHT OX DRAMA OF THE CLIFFS. MR. DELAY'S DUAL LIFE. Wlion James Arthur Delay hanged himself to a coat-hook behind his bedroom door after Mrs. Xowill had stepped out into the darkness never again to be seen alive, there ended an extraordinary life- of mystery—a man who was one of the most extraordinary schemers ever known. 1 He weaved plots in his own life and the life of people round him which would i be difficult to match in a melodramatic , novel. The latest information that has leaked out throws a strange light upon his secretive life. His friends and relatives were surprised on learning of his secret passion for Mrs. Xowill; his friends and relatives were astonished to find after his death that he was married—that he had been married for 13 months. ! But the most amazing secret that he kept from everyone, except one woman, was the fact that he secretly passed through the British Divorce Court in 1010-1911 under a false name, without his identity being suspected either by his relatives, his friends, his solicitors, or, above all, by the wronged husband. _ The story of how Delay won the affection of a woman who was supposed to be leading a normal, happy married life, without any suspicion reaching her husband, is one that would seem "incredible if told in a work of fiction. Delay became associated with a Mrs. Young—when, only he and she knew but probably in 1909. Secretlv the two met—when, or how often, this secret man has succeeded in hiding from everyone. At the same period in that year or very early in 1910, the woman agreed to give up her husband and home and throw in her lot with Delay. This step was obviously "not one dictated entirely by impulse, 'so far as Delay was concerned. He had decided in his deep and secret manner that he would TAKE THE WOMAX FROM HER HUSBAND

and marry her. Yet he did not desire that anyone but she should know who had inflicted the wrong upon her husband.

So, -with quiet, determination and painstaking care, he evolved a scheme winch his legal knowledge doubtless helped liiin to devise—of concealing the identity of Arthur Delay for the time being and evolving another person. He therefore conjured up one Arthur Daly. Arthur Daly, of unknown occupation and address, was to be the man who had stolen another's wife, and he was to continue to exist only until James Arthur Delay could return to his old world. Ihis apparently impossible task Delay carried out without anyone knowing. When Delay's plans were safely laid the woman-died from her astonished husband's house, leaving behind her a letter to her husband, stating: "I am leaving you for ever. . . . i am going away with the man 1 love with all my heart and soul."

A ever since has the husband seen the wife, except for a brief moment in a London street, and who the man was for whom he she had left him he had no idea until after the Newquay tragedy. lhe decree was made absolute last year. Shortly afterwards Arthur Daly ceased to exist, and James Arthur Delay married Mrs Young on November 1, 1911 m New York.

Only the woman who became Mrs. Delay can carry on the story of this strange man s life from that date. They we?e married on November 1, 1011, and those wHo called were informed at her flat in South Kensington that she had collapsed, and was too ill to be seen. Mrs Delay is a tall, handsome, darkl.aired woman. Since the funeral of her Husband she had been several times in mourning. But the suffering she has undergone since the suicide of Delay and tlic publicity connected with the emerging of the facts of his life were visibly telling upon her, and it was stated that she was hysterical and 100 ill to see anybody but her most intimate friends. Delay had not visited her, nor been wen in the neighborhood of the flat—winch is over a shop-since Mrs. Delav came to live there.