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Title: The Mayor's Wife

Author: Anna Katherine Green

Release Date: December, 2003 [Etext #4767]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on March 15, 2002]
[Date last updated: October 15, 2005]

Edition: 10

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG ETEXT THE MAYOR'S WIFE ***









THE MAYOR'S WIFE

by Anna Katherine Green






CONTENTS


CHAPTER

    I  A SPY'S DUTY
   II  QUESTIONS
  III  IN THE GABLE WINDOW
   IV  LIGHTS-SOUNDS
    V  THE STRANGE NEIGHBORS NEXT DOOR
   VI  AT THE STAIR-HEAD
  VII  A MOVING SHADOW
 VIII  THE PARAGRAPH
   IX  SCRAPS
    X  A GLIMMER OF THE TRUTH
   XI  BESS
  XII  SEARCHINGS
 XIII  A DISCOVERY
  XIV  I SEEK HELP
   XV  HARDLY A COINCIDENCE
  XVI  IN THE LIBRARY
 XVII  THE TWO WEIRD SISTERS
XVIII  THE MORNING NEWS
  XIX  THE CRY FROM THE STAIRS
   XX  EXPLANATION
  XXI  THE CIPHER
 XXII  MERCY
XXIII  THE WIFE'S TALE
 XXIV  THE SINS OF THE FATHERS
  XXV  THE FINGER ON THE WALL
 XXVI  "BITTER AS THE GRAVE"
XXVII  A CHILD'S PLAYTHINGS
XXVIII  RESTITUTION




CHAPTER I

A SPY'S DUTY


I am not without self-control, yet when Miss Davies entered the
room with that air of importance she invariably assumes when she
has an unusually fine position to offer, I could not hide all
traces of my anxiety.

I needed a position, needed it badly, while the others--

But her eyes are on our faces, she is scanning us all with that
close and calculating gaze which lets nothing escape.  She has
passed me by--my heart goes down, down--when suddenly her look
returns and she singles me out.

"Miss Saunders."  Then, "I have a word to say to you."

There is a rustle about me; five disappointed girls sink back
into their seats as I quickly rise and follow Miss Davies out.

In the hall she faced me with these words:

"You are discreet, and you evidently desire a position.  You will
find a gentleman in my sitting-room.  If you come to terms with
him, well and good.  If not, I shall expect you to forget all
about him and his errand the moment you leave his presence.  You
understand me?"

"I think so," I replied, meeting her steady look with one equally
composed.  Part of my strength--and I think I have some strength
--lies in the fact that I am quietest when most deeply roused.  "I
am not to talk whatever the outcome."

"Not even to me," she emphasized.

Stirred still further and therefore outwardly even more calm than
before, I stopped her as she was moving on and ventured a single
query.

"This position--involving secrecy--is it one you would advise me
to take, even if I did not stand in need of it so badly?"

"Yes.  The difficulties will not be great to a discreet person.
It is a first-class opportunity for a young woman as experienced
as yourself."

"Thank you," was my abrupt but grateful rejoinder; and, obeying
her silent gesture, I opened the door of the sitting-room and
passed in. A gentleman standing at one of the windows turned
quickly at the sound of my step and came forward.  Instantly
whatever doubt I may have felt concerning the nature of the work
about to be proposed to me yielded to the certainty that, however
much it might involve of the strange and difficult, the man whose
mission it was to seek my aid was one to inspire confidence and
respect.

He was also a handsome man, or no, I will not go so far as that;
he was only one in whom the lines of form and visage were fine
enough not to interfere with the impression made by his strong
nature and intense vitality.  A man to sway women and also quite
capable of moving men (this was evident at a glance); but a man
under a cloud just at present,--a very heavy cloud which both
irked and perplexed him.

Pausing in the middle of the room, he surveyed me closely for an
instant before speaking.  Did I impress him as favorably as he
did me?  I soon had reason to think so, for the nervous trembling
of his hands ceased after the first moment or two of silent
scrutiny, and I was sure I caught the note of hope in his voice
as he courteously remarked:

"You are seeking a place, young lady.  Do you think you can fill
the one I have to offer?  It has its difficulties, but it is not
an onerous one.  It is that of companion to my wife."

I bowed; possibly I smiled.  I do smile sometimes when a ray of
real sunshine darts across my pathway.

"I should be very glad to try such a situation," I replied.

A look of relief, so vivid that it startled me, altered at once
the whole character of his countenance; and perceiving how
intense was the power and fascination underlying his quiet
exterior, I asked myself who and what this man was; no ordinary
personage, I was sure, but who?  Had Miss Davies purposely
withheld his name?  I began to think so.

"I have had some experience," I was proceeding--

But he waved this consideration aside, with a change back to his
former gloomy aspect, and a careful glance at the door which did
not escape me.

"It is not experience which is so much needed as discretion."

Again that word.

"The case is not a common one, or, rather,"--he caught himself up
quickly, "the circumstances are not.  My wife is well, but--she
is not happy.  She is very unhappy, deeply, unaccountably so, and
I do not know why."

Anxious to watch the effect of these words, he paused a moment,
then added fervently:

"Would to God I did!  It would make a new man of me."

The meaning, the deep meaning in his tone, if not in the
adjuration itself, was undeniable; but my old habit of
self-control stood me in good stead and I remained silent
and watchful, weighing every look and word.

"A week ago she was the lightest hearted woman in town,--the
happiest wife, the merriest mother.  To-day she is a mere wreck
of her former self, pallid, drawn, almost speechless, yet she is
not ill.  She will not acknowledge to an ache or a pain; will not
even admit that any change has taken place in her.  But you have
only to see her.  And I am as ignorant of the cause of it all--as
you are!" he burst out.

Still I remained silent, waiting, watchful.

"I have talked with her physician.  He says there is something
serious the matter with her, but he can not help her, as it is
not in any respect physical, and advises me to find out what is
on her mind.  As if that had not been my first care!  I have also
consulted her most intimate friends, all who know her well, but
they can give me no clue to her distress.  They see the
difference in her, but can not tell the cause.  And I am obliged
to go away and leave her in this state.  For two weeks, three
weeks now, my movements will be very uncertain.  I am at the beck
and call of the State Committee.  At any other time I would try
change of scene, but she will neither consent to leave home
without me nor to interrupt my plans in order that I may
accompany her."

"Miss Davies has not told me your name," I made bold to
interpolate.

He stared, shook himself together, and quietly, remarked:

"I am Henry Packard."

The city's mayor! and not only that, the running candidate for
governor.  I knew him well by name, even if I did not know, or
rather had not recognized his face.

"I beg pardon," I somewhat tremulously began, but he waved the
coming apology aside as easily, as he had my first attempt at
ingratiation.  In fact, he appeared to be impatient of every
unnecessary word.  This I could, in a dim sort of way,
understand.  He was at the crisis of his fate, and so was his
party.  For several years a struggle had gone on between the two
nearly matched elements in this western city, which, so far, had
resulted in securing him two terms of office--possibly because
his character appealed to men of all grades and varying
convictions.  But the opposite party was strong in the state, and
the question whether he could carry his ticket against such odds,
and thus give hope to his party in the coming presidential
election, was one yet to be tested.  Forceful as a speaker, he
was expected to reap hundreds of votes from the mixed elements
that invariably thronged to hear him, and, ignorant as I
necessarily was of the exigencies of such a campaign, I knew that
not only his own ambition, but the hopes of his party, depended
on the speeches he had been booked to make in all parts of the
state.  And now, three weeks before election, while every
opposing force was coming to the surface, this trouble had come
upon him.  A mystery in his home and threatened death in his
heart!  For he loved his wife--that was apparent to me from the
first; loved her to idolatry, as such men sometimes do love,--
often to their own undoing.

All this, the thought of an instant.  Meanwhile he had been
studying me well.

"You understand my position," he commented.  "Wednesday night I
speak in C---, Thursday, in R---, while she--"  With an effort he
pulled himself together.  "Miss--"

"Saunders," I put in.

"Miss Saunders, I can not leave her alone in the house.  Some one
must be there to guard and watch--"

"Has she no mother?" I suggested in the pause he made.

"She has no living relatives, and mine are uncongenial to her."

This to save another question.  I understood him perfectly.

"I can not ask any of them to stay with her," he pursued
decisively.  "She would not consent to it.  Nor can I ask any of
her friends.  That she does not wish, either.  But I can hire a
companion.  To that she has already consented.  That she will
regard as a kindness, if the lady chosen should prove to be one
of those rare beings who carry comfort in their looks without
obtruding their services or displaying the extent of their
interest.  You know there are some situations in which the
presence of a stranger may be more grateful than that of a
friend.  Apparently, my wife feels herself so placed now."

Here his eyes again read my face, an ordeal out of which I came
triumphant; the satisfaction he evinced rightly indicated his
mind.

"Will you accept the position?" he asked.  "We have one little
child.  You will have no charge of her save as you may wish to
make use of her in reaching the mother."

The hint conveyed in the last phrase gave me courage to say:

"You wish me to reach her?"

"With comfort," said he.

"And if in doing so I learn her trouble?"

"You will win my eternal gratitude by telling it to one who would
give ten years of his life to assuage it."

My head rose.  I began to feel that my next step must strike
solid ground.

"In other words to be quite honest--you wish me to learn her
trouble if I can."

"I believe you can be trusted to do so."

"And then to reveal it to you?"

"If your sense of duty permits,--which I think it will."

I might have uttered in reply, "A spy's duty?" but the high-
mindedness of his look forbade.  Whatever humiliation his wishes
put upon me, there could be no question of the uprightness of his
motives regarding his wife.

I ventured one more question.

"How far shall I feel myself at liberty to go in this attempt?"

"As far as your judgment approves and circumstances seem to
warrant.  I know that you will come upon nothing dishonorable to
her, or detrimental to our relations as husband and wife, in this
secret which is destroying our happiness.  Her affection for me
is undoubted, but something--God knows what--has laid waste her
life.  To find and annihilate that something is my first and
foremost duty.  It does not fit well with those other duties
pressing upon me from the political field, does it?  That is why
I have called in help.  That is why I have called you in."

The emphasis was delicately but sincerely given.  It struck my
heart and entered it.  Perhaps he had calculated upon this.  If
so, it was because he knew that a woman like myself works better
when her feelings are roused.

Answering with a smile, I waited patiently while he talked terms
and other equally necessary details, then dropping all these
considerations, somewhat in his own grand manner, I made this
remark:

"If your wife likes me, which very possibly she may fail to do, I
shall have a few questions to ask you before I settle down to my
duties.  Will you see that an opportunity is given me for doing
this?"

His assent was as frank as all the rest, and the next moment he
left the room.

As he passed out I heard him remark to Miss Davies:

"I expect Miss Saunders at my house before nightfall.  I shall
reserve some minutes between half-past five and six in which to
introduce her to Mrs. Packard."



CHAPTER II

QUESTIONS


I knew all the current gossip about Mrs. Packard before I had
parted with Miss Davies.  Her story was a simple one.  Bred in
the West, she had come, immediately after her mother's death, to
live with that mother's brother in Detroit.  In doing this she
had walked into a fortune.  Her uncle was a rich man and when he
died, which was about a year after her marriage with Mr. Packard
and removal to C--, she found herself the recipient of an
enormous legacy.  She was therefore a woman of independent means,
an advantage which, added to personal attractions of a high
order, and manners at once dignified and winning, caused her to
be universally regarded as a woman greatly to be envied by all
who appreciated a well-founded popularity.

So much for public opinion.  It differs materially from that just
given me by her husband.

The mayor lived on Franklin Street in a quarter I had seldom
visited.  As I entered this once aristocratic thoroughfare from
Carlton Avenue, I was struck as I had been before by its
heterogeneous appearance.  Houses of strictly modern type
neighbored those of a former period, and it was not uncommon to
see mansion and hovel confronting each other from the opposite
side of the street.  Should I find the number I sought attached
to one of the crude, unmeaning dwellings I was constantly
passing, or to one of mellower aspect and possibly historic
association?

I own that I felt a decided curiosity on this point, and
congratulated myself greatly when I had left behind me a
peculiarly obnoxious monstrosity in stone, whose imposing
proportions might reasonably commend themselves to the
necessities, if not to the taste of the city's mayor.

A little shop, one story in height and old enough for its simple
wooden walls to cry aloud for paint, stood out from the middle of
a row of cheap brick houses.  Directly opposite it were two
conspicuous dwellings, neither of them new and one of them
ancient as the street itself.  They stood fairly close together,
with an alley running between.  From the number I had now reached
it was evident that the mayor lived in one of these.  Happily it
was in the fresher and more inviting one.  As I noted this, I
paused in admiration of its spacious front and imposing doorway.
The latter was in the best style of Colonial architecture, and
though raised but one step from the walk, was so distinguished by
the fan-tailed light overhead and the flanking casements glazed
with antique glass, that I felt myself carried back to the days
when such domiciles were few and denoted wealth the most solid,
and hospitality the most generous.

A light wall, painted to match the house, extended without break
to the adjoining building, a structure equal to the other in age
and dimensions, but differing in all other respects as much as
neglect and misuse could make it.  Gray and forbidding, it
towered in its place, a perfect foil to the attractive dwelling
whose single step I now amounted with cheerful composure.

What should I have thought if at that moment I had been told that
appearances were deceitful, and that there were many persons then
living who, if left to their choice, would prefer life in the
dismal walls from which I had instinctively turned, to a single
night spent in the promising house I was so eager to enter.

An old serving-man, with a countenance which struck me pleasantly
enough at the time, opened the door in response to my ring, only
to make instant way for Mayor Packard, who advanced from some
near-by room to greet me.  By this thoughtful attention I was
spared the embarrassment from which I might otherwise have
suffered.

His few words of greeting set me entirely at my ease, and I was
quite ready to follow him when a moment later he invited me to
meet Mrs. Packard.

"I can not promise you just the reception you naturally look
for," said he, as he led me around the stairs toward an opening
at their rear, "but she's a kind woman and can not but be struck
with your own kind spirit and quiet manner."

Happily, I was not called upon to answer, for at that moment the
door swung open and he ushered me into a room flooded brilliantly
with the last rays of the setting sun.  The woman who sat in its
glow made an instant and permanent impression upon me.  No one
could look intently upon her without feeling that here was a
woman of individuality and power, overshadowed at present by the
deepest melancholy.  As she rose and faced us I decided instantly
that her husband had not exaggerated her state of mind.  Emotion
of no ordinary nature disturbed the lines of her countenance and
robbed her naturally fine figure of a goodly portion of its
dignity and grace; and though she immediately controlled herself
and assumed the imposing aspect of a highly trained woman, ready,
if not eager, to welcome an intruding guest, I could not easily
forget the drawn look about mouth and eyes which, in the first
instant of our meeting, had distorted features naturally
harmonious and beautifully serene.

I am sure her husband had observed it also, for his voice
trembled slightly as he addressed her.

"I have brought you a companion, Olympia, one whose business and
pleasure it will be to remain with you while I am making speeches
a hundred miles away.  Do you not see reason for thanking me?"
This last question he pointed with a glance in my direction,
which drew her attention and caused her to give me a kindly look.

I met her eyes fairly.  They were large and gray and meant for
smiling; eyes that, with a happy heart behind them, would
illumine her own beauty and create joy in those upon whom they
fell.  But to-day, nothing but question lived in their dark and
uneasy depths, and it was for me to face that question and give
no sign of what the moment was to me.

"I think--I am sure, that my thanks are due you," she courteously
replied, with a quick turn toward her husband, expressive of
confidence, and, as I thought, of love.  "I dreaded being left
alone."

He drew a deep breath of relief; we both did; then we talked a
little, after which Mayor Packard found some excuse for taking me
from the room.

"Now for the few words you requested," said he; and, preceding me
down the hall, he led me into what he called his study.

I noted one thing, and only one thing, on entering this place.
That was the presence of a young man who sat at a distant table
reading and making notes.  But as Mayor Packard took no notice of
him, knowing and expecting him to be there, no doubt, I, with a
pardonable confusion, withdrew my eyes from the handsomest face I
had ever seen, and, noting that my employer had stopped before a
type-writer's table, I took my place at his side, without knowing
very well what this move meant or what he expected me to do
there.

I was not long left in doubt.  With a gesture toward the
type-writer, he asked me if I was accustomed to its use; and when
I acknowledged some sort of acquaintance with it, he drew an
unanswered letter from a pile on the table and requested me to
copy it as a sample.

I immediately sat down before the type-writer.  I was in
something of a maze, but felt that I must follow his lead.  As I
proceeded to insert the paper and lay out the copy to hand, he
crossed over to the young man at the other end of the room and
began a short conversation which ended in some trivial demand
that sent the young man from the room.  As the door closed behind
him Mayor Packard returned to my side.

"Keep on with your work and never mind mistakes," said he.  "What
I want is to hear the questions you told me to expect from you if
you stayed."

Seemingly Mayor Packard did not wish this young man to know my
position in the house.  Was it possible he did not wholly trust
him?  My hands trembled from the machine and I was about to turn
and give my full thought to what I had to say.  But pride checked
the impulse.  "No," I muttered in quick dissuasion, to myself.
"He must see that I can do two things at once and do both well."
And so I went on with the letter.

"When," I asked, "did you first see the change in Mrs. Packard?"

"On Tuesday afternoon at about this time."

"What had happened on that day? Had she been out?"

"Yes, I think she told me later that she had been out."

"Do you know where?"

"To some concert, I believe.  I did not press her with questions,
Miss Saunders; I am a poor inquisitor."

Click, click; the machine was working admirably.

"Have you reason to think," I now demanded, "that she brought her
unhappiness in with her, when she returned from that concert?"

"No; for when I returned home myself, as I did earlier than
usual that night, I heard her laughing with the child in the
nursery.  It was afterward, some few minutes afterward, that I
came upon her sitting in such a daze of misery, that she did not
recognize me when I spoke to her.  I thought it was a passing
mood at the time; she is a sensitive woman and she had been
reading--I saw the book lying on the floor at her side; but when,
having recovered from her dejection--a dejection, mind you, which
she would neither acknowledge nor explain--she accompanied me
out to dinner, she showed even more feeling on our return,
shrinking unaccountably from leaving the carriage and showing,
not only in this way but in others, a very evident distaste to
reenter her own house.  Now, whatever hold I still retain upon
her is of so slight a nature that I am afraid every day she will
leave me."

"Leave you!"

My fingers paused; my astonishment had got the better of me.

"Yes; it is as bad as that.  I don't know what day you will send
me a telegram of three words, 'She has gone.'  Yet she loves me,
really and truly loves me.  That is the mystery of it.  More than
this, her very heart-strings are knit up with those of our
child."

"Mayor Packard,"--I had resumed work,--"was any letter  delivered
to her that day?"

"That I can not say."

Fact one for me to establish.

"The wives of men like you--men much before the world, men in the
thick of strife, social and political--often receive letters of a
very threatening character."

"She would have shown me any such, if only to put me on my guard.
She is physically a very brave woman and not at all nervous."

"Those letters sometimes assume the shape of calumny.  Your
character may have been attacked."

"She believes in my character and would have given me an
opportunity to vindicate myself.  I have every confidence in my
wife's sense of justice."

I experienced a thrill of admiration for the appreciation he
evinced in those words.  Yet I pursued the subject resolutely.

"Have you an enemy, Mayor Packard?  Any real and downright enemy
capable of a deep and serious attempt at destroying your
happiness?"

"None that I know of, Miss Saunders.  I have political enemies,
of course men, who, influenced by party feeling, are not above
attacking methods and possibly my official reputation; but
personal ones--wretches willing to stab me in my home-life and
affections, that I can not believe.  My life has been as an open
book.  I have harmed no man knowingly and, as far as I know, no
man has ever cherished a wish to injure me."

"Who constitute your household?  How many servants do you keep
and how long have they been with you?"

"Now you exact details with which only Mrs. Packard is
conversant.  I don't know anything about the servants.  I do not
interest myself much in matters purely domestic, and Mrs. Packard
spares me.  You will have to observe the servants yourself."

I made another note in my mind while inquiring:

"Who is the young man who was here just now?  He has an uncommon
face."

"A handsome one, do you mean?"

"Yes, and--well, what I should call distinctly clever."

"He is clever.  My secretary, Miss Saunders.  He helps me in my
increased duties; has, in a way, charge of my campaign; reads,
sorts and sometimes answers my letters.  Just now he is arranging
my speeches--fitting them to the local requirements of the
several audiences I shall be called upon to address.  He knows
mankind like a book.  I shall never give the wrong speech to the
wrong people while he is with me."

"Do you like him?--the man, I mean, not his work."

"Well--yes. He is very good company, or would have been if, in
the week he has been in the house, I had been in better mood to
enjoy him.  He's a capital story-teller."

"He has been here a week?"

"Yes, or almost."

"Came on last Tuesday, didn't he?"

"Yes, I believe that was the day."

"Toward afternoon?"

"No; he came early; soon after breakfast, in fact."

"Does your wife like him?"

His Honor gave a start, flushed (I can sometimes see a great deal
even while very busily occupied) and answered without anger, but
with a good deal of pride:

"I doubt if Mrs. Packard more than knows of his presence.  She
does not come to this room."

"And he does not sit at your table?"

"No; I must have some few minutes in the day free from the
suggestion of politics.  Mr. Steele can safely be left out of our
discussion.  He does not even sleep in the house."

The note I made at this was very emphatic.  "You should know,"
said I; then quickly "Tuesday was the day Mrs. Packard first
showed the change you observed in her."

"Yes, I think so; but that is a coincidence only.  She takes no
interest in this young man; scarcely noticed him when I
introduced him; just bowed to him over her shoulder; she was
fastening on our little one's cap.  Usually she is extremely,
courteous to strangers, but she was abstracted, positively
abstracted at that moment.  I wondered at it, for he usually
makes a stir wherever he goes.  But my wife cares little for
beauty in a man; I doubt if she noticed his looks at all.  She
did not catch his name, I remember."

"Pardon me, what is that you say?"

"She did not catch his name, for later she asked me what it was."

"Tell me about that, Mr. Packard."

"It is immaterial; but I am ready to answer all your questions.
It was while we were out dining.  Chance threw us together, and
to fill up the moment she asked the name of the young man I had
brought into the library that morning.  I told her and explained
his position and the long training he had had in local politics.
She listened, but not as closely as she did to the music.  Oh,
she takes no interest in him.  I wish she did; his stories might
amuse her."

I did not pursue the subject.  Taking out the letter I had been
writing, I held it out for his inspection, with the remark:

"More copy, please, Mayor Packard."




CHAPTER III

IN THE GABLE WINDOW


A few minutes later I was tripping up-stairs in the wake of a
smart young maid whom Mayor Packard had addressed as Ellen.  I
liked this girl at first sight and, as I followed her up first
one flight, then another, to the room which had been chosen for
me, the hurried glimpses I had of her bright and candid face
suggested that in this especial member of the household I might
hope to find a friend and helper in case friendship and help were
needed in the blind task to which I stood committed.  But I soon
saw cause--or thought I did--to change this opinion.  When she
turned on me at the door of my room, a small one at the extreme
end of the third floor, I had an opportunity of meeting her eyes.
The interest in her look was not the simple one to be expected.
In another person in other circumstances I should have
characterized her glance as one of inquiry and wonder.  But
neither inquiry nor wonder described the present situation, and I
put myself upon my guard.

Seeing me look her way, she flushed, and, throwing wide the door,
remarked in the pleasantest of tones:

"This is your room.  Mrs. Packard says that if it is not large
enough or does not seem pleasant to you, she will find you
another one to-morrow."

"It's very pleasant and quite large enough," I confidently
replied, after a hasty look about me.  "I could not be more
comfortable."

She smiled, a trifle broadly for the occasion, I thought, and
patted a pillow here and twitched a curtain there, as she
remarked with a certain emphasis:

"I'm sure you will be comfortable.  There's nobody else on this
floor but Letty and the baby, but you don't look as if you would
be easily frightened."  Astonished, not so much by her words as
by the furtive look she gave me, I laughed as I repeated
"Frightened?  What should frighten me?"

"Oh, nothing." Her back was to me now, but I felt that I knew her
very look.  "Nothing, of course.  If you're not timid you won't
mind sleeping so far away from every one.  Then, we are always
within call.  The attic door is just a few steps off.  We'll
leave it unlocked and you can come up if--if you feel like it at
any time.  We'll understand."

Understand!  I eyed her as she again looked my way, with some of
her own curiosity if not wonder.

"Mrs. Packard must have had some very timorous guests," I
observed.  "Or, perhaps, you have had experiences here which have
tended to alarm you.  The house is so large and imposing for the
quarter it is in I can readily imagine it to attract burglars."

"Burglars!  It would be a brave burglar who would try to get in
here.  I guess you never heard about this house."

"No," I admitted, unpleasantly divided between a wish to draw her
out and the fear of betraying Mayor Packard's trust in me by
showing the extent of my interest.

"Well, it's only gossip," she laughingly assured me.  "You
needn't think of it, Miss.  I'm sure you'll be all right.  We
girls have been, so far, and Mrs. Packard--"

Here she doubtless heard a voice outside or some summons from
below, for she made a quick start toward the door, remarking in a
different and very pleasant tone of voice:

"Dinner at seven, Miss.  There'll be no extra company to-night.
I'm coming."  This to some one in the hall as she hastily passed
through the door.

Dropping the bag I had lifted to unpack, I stared at the door
which had softly closed under her hand, then, with an odd
impulse, turned to look at my own face in the glass before which
I chanced to be standing.  Did I expect to find there some
evidence of the excitement which this strange conversation might
naturally produce in one already keyed up to an expectation of
the mysterious and unusual?  If so, I was not disappointed.  My
features certainly betrayed the effect of this unexpected attack
upon my professional equanimity.  What did the girl mean?  What
was she hinting at?  What underlay--what could underlie her
surprising remark, "I guess you never heard about this house"?
Something worth my knowing; something which might explain Mayor
Packard's fears and Mrs. Packard's--

There I stopped.  It was where the girl had stopped.  She and not
I must round out this uncompleted sentence.

Meanwhile I occupied myself in unpacking my two bags and making
acquaintance with the room which, I felt, was destined to be the
scene of many, anxious thoughts.  Its first effect had been a
cheerful one, owing to its two large windows, one looking out on
a stretch of clear sky above a mass of low, huddled buildings,
and the other on the wall of the adjacent house which, though
near enough to obstruct the view, was not near enough to exclude
all light.  Another and closer scrutiny of the room did not alter
the first impression.  To the advantages of light were added
those of dainty furnishing and an exceptionally pleasing color
scheme.  There was no richness anywhere, but an attractive
harmony which gave one an instantaneous feeling of home.  From
the little brass bedstead curtained with cretonne, to the tiny
desk filled with everything needful for immediate use, I saw
evidences of the most careful housekeeping, and was vainly asking
myself what could have come into Mrs. Packard's life to disturb
so wholesome a nature, when my attention was arrested by a
picture hanging at the right of the window overlooking the next
house.

It gave promise of being a most interesting sketch, and I crossed
over to examine it; but instead of doing so, found my eyes drawn
toward something more vital than any picture and twice as
enchaining.

It was a face, the face of an old woman staring down at me from a
semicircular opening in the gable of the adjoining house.  An
ordinary circumstance in itself, but made extraordinary by the
fixity of her gaze, which was leveled straight on mine, and the
uncommon expression of breathless eagerness which gave force to
her otherwise commonplace features.  So remarkable was this
expression and so apparently was it directed against myself, that
I felt like throwing up my window and asking the poor old
creature what I could do for her.  But her extreme immobility
deterred me.  For all the intentness of her look there was no
invitation in it warranting such an advance on my part.  She
simply stared down at me in unbroken anxiety, nor, though I
watched her for some minutes with an intensity equal to her own,
did I detect any change either in her attitude or expression.

"Odd," thought I, and tested her with a friendly bow. The
demonstration failed to produce the least impression.  "A most
uncanny neighbor," was my mental comment on finally turning away.
Truly I was surrounded by mysteries, but fortunately this was one
with which I had no immediate concern. It did not take me long to
put away my few belongings and prepare for dinner.  When quite
ready, I sat down to write a letter.  This completed, I turned to
go downstairs.  But before leaving the room I cast another look
up at my neighbor's attic window.  The old woman was still there.
As our glances met I experienced a thrill which was hardly one of
sympathy, yet was not exactly one of fear.  My impulse was to
pull down the shade between us, but I had not the heart.  She was
so old, so feeble and so, evidently the prey of some strange and
fixed idea.  What idea?  It was not for me to say, but I found it
impossible to make any move which would seem to shut her out; so
I left the shade up; but her image followed me and I forgot it
only when confronted once again with Mrs. Packard.

That lady was awaiting me at the dining-room door.  She had
succeeded in throwing off her secret depression and smiled quite
naturally as I approached.  Her easy, courteous manners became
her wonderfully.  I immediately recognized how much there was to
admire in our mayor's wife, and quite understood his relief when,
a few minutes later, we sat at table and conversation began.
Mrs. Packard, when free and light-hearted, was a delightful
companion and the meal passed off cheerily.  When we rose and the
mayor left us for some necessary business it was with a look of
satisfaction in my direction which was the best possible
preparation for my approaching tete-a-tete with his moody and
incomprehensible wife.

But I was not destined to undergo the contemplated ordeal this
evening.  Guests were announced whom Mrs. Packard kindly invited
me to meet, but I begged to be allowed to enjoy the library.  I
had too much to consider just now, to find any pleasure in
society.  Three questions filled my mind.

What was Mrs. Packard's secret trouble?

Why were people afraid to remain in this house?

Why did the old woman next door show such interest in the new
member of her neighbor's household?

Would a single answer cover all?  Was there but one cause for
each and every one of these peculiarities?  Probably, and it was
my duty to ferret out this cause.  But how should I begin?  I
remembered what I had read about detectives and their methods,
but the help I thus received was small.  Subtler methods were
demanded here and subtler methods I must find.  Meantime, I would
hope for another talk with Mayor Packard.  He might clear up some
of this fog.  At least, I should like to give him the
opportunity.  But I saw no way of reaching him at present.  Even
Mrs. Packard did not feel at liberty to disturb him in his study.
I must wait for his reappearance, and in the meantime divert
myself as best I could.  I caught up a magazine, but speedily
dropped it to cast a quick glance around the room.  Had I heard
anything?  No.  The house was perfectly still, save for the sound
of conversation in the drawing-room.  Yet I found it hard to keep
my eyes upon the page.  Quite without my volition they flew,
first to one corner, then to another.  The room was light, there
were no shadowy nooks in it, yet I felt an irresistible desire to
peer into every place not directly under my eye.  I knew it to be
folly, and, after succumbing to the temptation of taking a sly
look behind a certain tall screen, I resolutely set myself to
curb my restlessness and to peruse in good earnest the article I
had begun.  To make sure of myself, I articulated each word
aloud, and to my exceeding satisfaction had reached the second
column when I found my voice trailing off into silence, and every
sense alarmingly alert.  Yet there was nothing, absolutely
nothing in this well-lighted, cozy family-room to awaken fear.  I
was sure of this the next minute, and felt correspondingly
irritated with myself and deeply humiliated.  That my nerves
should play me such a trick at the very outset of my business in
this house!  That I could not be left alone, with life in every
part of the house, and the sound of the piano and cheerful
talking just across the hall, without the sense of the morbid and
unearthly entering my matter-of-fact brain!

Uttering an ejaculation of contempt, I reseated myself.  The
impulse came again to look behind me, but I mastered it this time
without too great an effort.  I already knew every feature of the
room: its old-fashioned mantel, large round center-table, its
couches and chairs, and why should I waste my attention again
upon them?

"Is there anything you wish, Miss?" asked a voice directly over my
shoulder.

I wheeled about with a start.  I had heard no one approach; it
was not sound which had disturbed me.

"The library bell rang," continued the voice.  "Is it ice-water
you want?"

Then I saw that it was Nixon, the butler, and shook my head in
mingled anger and perplexity; for not only had he advanced quite
noiselessly, but he was looking at me with that curious
concentrated gaze which I had met twice before since coming into
this house.

"I need nothing," said I, with all the mildness I could summon
into my voice; and did not know whether to like or not like the
quiet manner in which he sidled out of the room.

"Why do they all look at me so closely?" I queried, in genuine
confusion.  "The man had no business here.  I did not ring, and I
don't believe he thought I did.  He merely wanted to see what I
was doing and whether I was enjoying myself.  Why this curiosity?
I have never roused it anywhere else.  It is not myself they are
interested in, but the cause and purpose of my presence under
this roof."  I paused to wonder over the fact that the one member
of the family who might be supposed to resent my intrusion most
was the one who took it most kindly and with least token of
surprise--Mrs. Packard.

"She accepts me easily enough," thought I.  "To her I am a
welcome companion.  What am I to these?"

The answer, or rather a possible answer, came speedily.  At nine
o'clock Mayor Packard entered the room from his study across the
hall, and, seeing me alone, came forward briskly. "Mrs. Packard
has company and I am on my way to the drawing-room, but I am
happy to have the opportunity of assuring you that already she
looks better, and that I begin to hope that your encouraging
presence may stimulate her to throw aside her gloom and needless
apprehensions.  I shall be eternally grateful to you if it will.
It is the first time in a week that she has consented to receive
visitors."  I failed to feel the same elation over this possibly
temporary improvement in his wife's condition, but I carefully
refrained from betraying my doubts.  On the contrary, I took
advantage of the moment to clear my mind of one of the many
perplexities disturbing it.

"And I am glad of this opportunity to ask you what may seem a
foolish, if not impertinent question.  The maid, Ellen, in
showing me my room, was very careful to assure me that she slept
near me and would let me into her room in case I experienced any
alarm in the night; and when I showed surprise at her expecting
me to feel alarm of any kind in a house full of people, made the
remark, 'I guess you do not know about this house.'  Will you
pardon me if I ask if there is anything I don't know, and should
know, about the home your suffering wife inhabits?  A problem
such as you have given me to solve demands a thorough
understanding of every cause capable of creating disturbance in a
sensitive mind."

The mayor's short laugh failed to hide his annoyance. "You will
find nothing in this direction," said he, "to account for the
condition I have mentioned to you.  Mrs. Packard is utterly
devoid of superstition.  That I made sure of before signing the
lease of this old house.  But I forgot; you are doubtless
ignorant of its reputation.  It has, or rather has had, the name
of being haunted.  Ridiculous, of course, but a fact with which
Mrs. Packard has had to contend in"--he gave me a quick glance
--"in hiring servants."

It was now my turn to smile, but somehow I did not.  A vision had
risen in my mind of that blank and staring face in the attic
window next door, and I felt--well, I don't know how I felt, but
I did not smile.

Another short laugh escaped him.

"We have not been favored by any manifestations from the
spiritual world.  This has proved a very matter-of-fact sort of
home for us.  I had almost forgotten that it was burdened with
such an uncanny reputation, and I'm sure that Mrs. Packard would
have shared my indifference if it had not been for the domestic
difficulty I have mentioned.  It took us two weeks to secure help
of any kind."

"Indeed! and how long have you been in the house?  I judge that
you rent it?"

"Yes, we rent it and we have been here two months.  It was the
only house I could get in a locality convenient for me; besides,
the old place suits me.  It would take more than an obsolete
ghost or so to scare me away from what I like."

"But Mrs. Packard?  She may not be a superstitious woman, yet--"

"Don't be fanciful, Miss Saunders.  You will have to look deeper
than that for the spell which has been cast over my wife.
Olympia afraid of creaks and groans?  Olympia seeing sights?
She's much too practical by nature, Miss Saunders, to say nothing
of the fact that she would certainly have confided her trouble to
me, had her imagination been stirred in this way.  Little things
have invariably been discussed between us.  I repeat that this
possibility should not give you a moment's thought."

A burst of sweet singing came from the drawing-room.

"That's her voice," he cried.  "Whatever her trouble may be she
has forgotten it for the moment.  Excuse me if I join her.  It is
such pleasure to have her at all like herself again."

I longed to detain him, longed to put some of the numberless
questions my awakened curiosity demanded, but his impatience was
too marked and I let him depart without another word.

But I was not satisfied.  Inwardly I determined to see him again
as soon as possible and gain a more definite insight into the
mysteries of his home.




CHAPTER IV

LIGHTS--SOUNDS


I am by nature a thoroughly practical woman.  If I had not been,
the many misfortunes of my life would have made me so.  Yet, when
the library door closed behind the mayor and I found myself again
alone in a spot where I had not felt comfortable from the first,
I experienced an odd sensation not unlike fear.  It left me
almost immediately and my full reasoning powers reasserted
themselves; but the experience had been mine and I could not
smile it away.

The result was a conviction, which even reason could not dispel,
that whatever secret tragedy or wrong had signalized this house,
its perpetration had taken place in this very room.  It was a
fancy, but it held, and under its compelling if irrational
influence, I made a second and still more minute survey of the
room to which this conviction had imparted so definite an
interest.

I found it just as ordinary and unsuggestive as before; an
old-fashioned, square apartment renovated and redecorated to suit
modern tastes.  Its furnishings I have already described; they
were such as may be seen in any comfortable abode.  I did not
linger over them a moment; besides, they were the property of the
present tenant, and wholly disconnected with the past I was
insensibly considering.  Only the four walls and what they held,
doors, windows and mantel-piece, remained to speak of those old
days.  Of the doors there were two, one opening into the main
hall under the stairs, the other into a cross corridor separating
the library from the dining-room.  It was through the dining-room
door Nixon had come when he so startled me by speaking
unexpectedly over my shoulder!  The two windows faced the main
door, as did the ancient, heavily carved mantel.  I could easily
imagine the old-fashioned shutters hidden behind the modern
curtains, and, being anxious to test the truth of my imaginings,
rose and pulled aside one of these curtains only to see, just as
I expected, the blank surface of a series of unslatted shutters,
tightly fitting one to another with old-time exactitude.  A flat
hook and staple fastened them.  Gently raising the window, and
lifting one, I pulled the shutter open and looked out.  The
prospect was just what I had been led to expect from the location
of the room--the long, bare wall of the neighboring house.  I was
curious about that house, more curious at this moment than ever
before; for though it stood a good ten feet away from the one I
was now in, great pains had been taken by its occupants to close
every opening which might invite the glances of a prying eye.  A
door which had once opened on the alley running between the two
houses had been removed and its place boarded up.  So with a
window higher up; the half-circle window near the roof, I could
not see from my present point of view.

Drawing back, I reclosed the shutter, lowered the window and
started for my own room.  As I passed the first stair-head, I
heard a baby's laugh, followed by a merry shout, which, ringing
through the house, seemed to dispel all its shadows.

I had touched reality again.  Remembering Mayor Packard's
suggestion that I might through the child find a means of reaching
the mother, I paid a short visit to the nursery where I found a
baby whose sweetness must certainly have won its mother's deepest
love.  Letty, the nurse, was of a useful but commonplace type, a
conscientious nurse, that was all.

But I was to have a further taste of the unusual that night and
to experience another thrill before I slept.  My room was dark
when I entered it, and, recognizing a condition favorable to
the gratification of my growing curiosity in regard to the
neighboring house, I approached the window and stole a quick look
at the gable-end where, earlier in the evening I had seen peering
out at me an old woman's face.  Conceive my astonishment at
finding the spot still lighted and a face looking out, but not
the same face, a countenance as old, one as intent, but of
different conformation and of a much more intellectual type.  I
considered myself the victim of an illusion; I tried to persuade
myself that it was the same woman, only in another garb and under
a different state of feeling; but the features were much too
dissimilar for such an hypothesis to hold.  The eagerness, the
unswerving attitude were the same, but the first woman had had a
weak round face with pinched features, while this one showed a
virile head and long heavy cheeks and chin, which once must have
been full of character, though they now showed only heaviness of
heart and the dull apathy of a fixed idea.

Two women, total strangers to me, united in an unceasing watch
upon me in my room!  I own that the sense of mystery which this
discovery brought struck me at the moment as being fully as
uncanny and as unsettling to contemplate as the idea of a spirit
haunting walls in which I was destined for a while to live,
breathe and sleep.  However, as soon as I had drawn the shade and
lighted the gas, I forgot the whole thing, and not till I was
quite ready for bed, and my light again turned low, did I feel
the least desire to take another peep at that mysterious window.
The face was still there, peering at me through a flood of
moonlight.  The effect was ghastly, and for hours I could not
sleep, imagining that face still staring down upon me,
illuminated with the unnatural light and worn with a profitless
and unmeaning vigil.

That there was something to fear in this house was evident from
the halting step with which the servants, one and all, passed my
door on their way up to their own beds.  I now knew, or thought I
knew, what was in their minds; but the comfort brought by this
understanding was scarcely sufficient to act as antidote to the
keen strain to which my faculties had been brought.  Yet nothing
happened, and when a clock somewhere in the house had assured me
by its own clear stroke that the dreaded midnight hour had passed
I rose and stole again to the window.  This time both moonlight
and face were gone.  Contentment came with the discovery.  I
crept back to bed with lightened heart and soon was asleep.

Next morning, however, the first face was again at the window, as
I at once saw on raising the blind.  I breakfasted alone.  Mrs.
Packard was not yet down and the mayor had already left to fulfil
an early appointment down-town.  Old Nixon waited on me.  As he,
like every other member of the family, with the possible
exception of the mayor, was still an unknown quantity in the
problem given me to solve, I allowed a few stray glances to
follow him as he moved decorously about the board anticipating my
wants and showing himself an adept in his appointed task.  Once I
caught his eye and I half expected him to speak, but he was too
well-trained for that, and the meal proceeded in the same silence
in which it had begun.  But this short interchange of looks had
given me an idea.  He showed an eager interest in me quite apart
from his duty to me as waiter.  He was nearer sixty, than fifty,
but it was not his age which made his hand tremble as he laid
down a plate before me or served me with coffee and bread.
Whether this interest was malevolent or kindly I found it
impossible to judge.  He had a stoic's face with but one eloquent
feature--his eyes; and these he kept studiously lowered after
that one quick glance.  Would it help matters for me to address
him?  Possibly, but I decided not to risk it.  Whatever my
immediate loss I must on no account rouse the least distrust in
this evidently watchful household.  If knowledge came naturally,
well and good; I must not seem to seek it.

The result proved my discretion.  As I was rising from the table
Nixon himself made this remark:

"Mrs. Packard will be glad to see you in her room up-stairs any
time after ten o'clock.  Ellen will show you where."  Then, as I
was framing a reply, he added in a less formal tone: "I hope you
were not disturbed last night.  I told the girls not to be so
noisy."

Now they had been very quiet, so I perceived that he simply
wanted to open conversation.

"I slept beautifully," I assured him.  "Indeed, I'm not easily
kept awake.  I don't believe I could keep awake if I knew that a
ghost would stalk through my room at midnight."

His eyes opened, and he did just what I had intended him to do,
--met my glance directly.

"Ghosts!" he repeated, edging uneasily forward, perhaps with the
intention of making audible his whisper: "Do you believe in
ghosts?"

I laughed easily and with a ringing merriment, like the
light-hearted girl I should be and am not.

"No," said I, "why should I?  But I should like to.  I really
should enjoy the experience of coming face to face with a wholly
shadowless being."

He stared and now his eyes told nothing.  Mechanically I moved to
go, mechanically he stepped aside to give me place.  But his
curiosity or his interest would not allow him to see me pass out
without making another attempt to understand me.  Stammering in
his effort to seem indifferent, he dropped this quiet observation
just as I reached the door.

"Some people say, or at least I have heard it whispered in the
neighborhood, that this house is haunted.  I've never seen
anything, myself."

I forced myself to give a tragic start (I was half ashamed of my
arts), and, coming back, turned a purposely excited countenance
toward him.

"This house!" I cried.  "Oh, how lovely!  I never thought I
should have the good fortune of passing the night in a house that
is really haunted.  What are folks supposed to see?  I don't know
much about ghosts out of books."

This nonplussed him.  He was entirely out of his element.  He
glanced nervously at the door and tried to seem at his ease;
perhaps tried to copy my own manner as he mumbled these words:

"I've not given much attention to the matter, Miss.  It's not
long since we came here and Mrs. Packard don't approve of our
gossiping with the neighbors.  But I think the people have
mostly been driven away by strange noises and by lights which no
one could explain, flickering up over the ceilings from the halls
below.  I don't want to scare you, Miss--"

"Oh, you won't scare me."

"Mrs. Packard wouldn't like me to do that.  She never listens to
a word from us about these things, and we don't believe the half
of it ourselves; but the house does have a bad name, and it's the
wonder of everybody that the mayor will live in it."

"Sounds?" I repeated.  "Lights?"--and laughed again.  "I don't
think I shall bother myself about them!" I went gaily out.

It did seem very puerile to me, save as it might possibly account
in some remote way for Mrs. Packard's peculiar mental condition.

Up-stairs I found Ellen.  She was in a talkative mood, and this
time I humored her till she had told me all she knew about the
house and its ghostly traditions.  This all had come from a
servant, a nurse who had lived in the house before.  Ellen herself,
like the butler, Nixon, had had no personal experiences to relate,
though the amount of extra wages she received had quite prepared
her for them.  Her story, or rather the nurse's story, was to the
following effect.

The house had been built and afterward inhabited for a term of
years by one of the city fathers, a well-known and still widely
remembered merchant.  No unusual manifestations had marked it
during his occupancy.  Not till it had run to seed and been the
home of decaying gentility, and later of actual poverty, did it
acquire a name which made it difficult to rent, though the
neighborhood was a growing one and the house itself well-enough
built to make it a desirable residence.  Those who had been
induced to try living within its spacious walls invariably left
at the end of the month.  Why, they hesitated to say; yet if
pressed would acknowledge that the rooms were full of terrible
sights and sounds which they could not account for; that a
presence other than their own was felt in the house; and that
once (every tenant seemed to be able to cite one instance) a hand
had touched them or a breath had brushed their cheek which had no
visible human source, and could be traced to no mortal presence.
Not much in all this, but it served after a while to keep the
house empty, while its reputation for mystery did not lie idle.
Sounds were heard to issue from it.  At times lights were seen
glimmering through this or that chink or rift in the window
curtain, but by the time the door was unlocked and people were
able to rush in, the interior was still and dark and seemingly
untouched.  Finally the police took a hand in the matter.  They
were on the scent just then of a party of counterfeiters and were
suspicious of the sounds and lights in this apparently unoccupied
dwelling.  But they watched and waited in vain.  One of them got
a scare and that was all.  The mystery went unsolved and the sign
"To Let" remained indefinitely on the house-front.

At last a family from the West decided to risk the terrors of
this domicile.  The nurse, whose story I was listening to, came
with them and entered upon her duties without prejudice or any
sort of belief in ghosts, general or particular.  She held this
belief just two weeks.  Then her incredulity began to waver.  In
fact, she saw the light; almost saw the ghost, certainly saw the
ghost's penumbra.  It was one night, or rather very early, one
morning.  She had been sitting up with the baby, who had been
suffering from a severe attack of croup.  Hot water was wanted,
and she started for the kitchen for the purpose of making a fire
and putting on the kettle.  The gas had not been lit in the hall
--they had all been too busy, and she was feeling her way down the
front stairs with a box of matches in her hand, when suddenly she
heard from somewhere below a sound which she could never
describe, and at the same moment saw a light which spread itself
through all the lower hall so that every object stood out
distinctly.

She did not think of the ghost at first, her thoughts were so
full of the child; but when a board creaked in the hall floor, a
board that always creaked when stepped on, she remembered the
reputation and what had been told her about a creaking board and
a light that came and went without human agency.  Frightened for
a minute, she stood stock-still, then she rushed down.  Whatever
it was, natural or supernatural, she went to see it; but the
light vanished before she passed the lower stair, and only a
long-drawn sigh not far from her ear warned her that the space
between her and the real hall was not the solitude she was
anxious to consider it.  A sigh!  That meant a person.  Striking
a match, she looked eagerly down the hall.  Something was moving
between the two walls.  But when she tried to determine its
character, it was swallowed up in darkness,--the match had gone
out.  Anxious for the child and determined to go her way to the
kitchen, she now felt about for the gas-fixture and succeeded in
lighting up.  The whole hall again burst into view but the thing
was no longer there; the space was absolutely empty.  And so were
the other rooms, for she went into every one, lighting the gas as
she went; and so was the cellar when she reached it.  For she had
to go to its extreme length for wood and wait about the kitchen
till the water boiled, during which time she searched every nook
and cranny.  Oh, she was a brave woman, but she did have this
thought as she went upstairs: If the child died she would know
that she had seen a spirit; if the child got well, that she had
been the victim of her own excitement.

And did the child die?

"No, it got well, but the family moved out as soon as it was safe
to leave the house.  Her employees did not feel as easy about the
matter as she did."



CHAPTER V

THE STRANGE NEIGHBORS NEXT DOOR

When I joined Mrs. Packard I found her cheerful and in all respects
quite unlike the brooding woman she had seemed when I first met
her.  From the toys scattered about her feet I judged that the
child had been with her, and certainly the light in her eyes had
the beaming quality we associate with the happy mother.  She was
beautiful thus and my hopes of her restoration to happiness rose.

"I have had a good night," were her first words as she welcomed me
to a seat in her own little nook.  "I'm feeling very well this
morning.  That is why I have brought out this big piece of work."
She held up a baby's coat she was embroidering.  "I can not do it
when I am nervous.  Are you ever nervous?"

Delighted to enter into conversation with her, I answered in a way
to lead her to talk about herself, then, seeing she was in a
favorable mood for gossip, was on the point of venturing all in a
leading question, when she suddenly forestalled me by putting one
to me.

"Were you ever the prey of an idea?" she asked; "one which you
could not shake off by any ordinary means, one which clung to you
night and day till nothing else seemed real or would rouse the
slightest interest? I mean a religious idea," she stammered with
anxious attempt of to hide her real thought.  "One of those doubts
which come to you in the full swing of life to--to frighten and
unsettle you."

"Yes," I answered, as naturally and quietly as I knew how; "I have
had such ideas--such doubts."

"And were you able to throw them off?--by your will, I mean."

She was leaning forward, her eyes fixed eagerly on mine.  How
unexpected the privilege! I felt that in another moment her secret
would be mine.

"In time, yes," I smiled back.  "Everything yields to time and
persistent conscientious work."

"But if you can not wait for time, if you must be relieved at once,
can the will be made to suffice, when the day is dark and one is
alone and not too busy?"

"The will can do much," I insisted.  "Dark thoughts can be kept
down by sheer determination.  But it is better to fill the mind so
full with what is pleasant that no room is left for gloom.  There
is so much to enjoy it must take a real sorrow to disturb a heart
resolved to be happy."

"Yes, resolved to be happy.  I am resolved to be happy."  And she
laughed merrily for a moment.  "Nothing else pays.  I will not
dwell on anything but the pleasures which surround me." Here she
took up her work again.  "I will forget--I will--"  She stopped and
her eyes left her work to flash a rapid and involuntary glance over
her shoulder.  Had she heard a step?  I had not.  Or had she felt
a draft of which I in my bounding health was unconscious?

"Are you cold?" I asked, as her glance stole back to mine.  "You
are shivering--"

"Oh, no," she answered coldly, almost proudly.  "I'm perfectly
warm.  I don't feel slight changes.  I thought some one was behind
me.  I felt--Is Ellen in the adjoining room?"

I jumped up and moved toward the door she indicated.  It was
slightly ajar, but Ellen was not behind it.

"There's no one here," said I.

She did not answer.  She was bending again over her work, and gave
no indication of speaking again on that or the more serious topic
we had previously been discussing.

Naturally I felt disappointed.  I had hoped much from the
conversation, and now these hopes bade fair to fail me.  How could
I restore matters to their former basis?  Idly I glanced out of the
side window I was passing, and the view of the adjoining house I
thus gained acted like an inspiration.  I would test her on a new
topic, in the hope of reintroducing the old.  The glimpse I had
gained into Mrs. Packard's mind must not be lost quite as soon as
this.

"You asked me a moment ago if I were ever nervous," I began, as I
regained my seat at her side.  "I replied, 'Sometimes'; but I might
have said if I had not feared being too abrupt, 'Never till I came
into this house.'"

Her surprise partook more of curiosity than I expected.

"You are nervous here," she repeated.  "What is the reason of that,
pray?  Has Ellen been chattering to you?  I thought she knew enough
not to do that.  There's nothing to fear here, Miss Saunders;
absolutely nothing for you to fear.  I should not have allowed you
to remain here a night if there had been.  No ghost will visit
you."

"No, I hear they never wander above the second story," I laughed.
"If they did I should hardly anticipate the honor of a visit.  It
is not ghosts I fear; it is something quite different which affects
me,--living eyes, living passions, the old ladies next door," I
finished falteringly, for Mrs. Packard was looking at me with a
show of startling alarm.  "They stare into my room night and day.
I never look out but I encounter the uncanny glance of one or the
other of them.  Are they live women or embodied memories of the
past?  They don't seem to belong to the present.  I own that they
frighten me."

I had exaggerated my feelings in order to mark their effect upon
her.  The result disappointed me; she was not afraid of these two
poor old women.  Far from it.

"Draw your curtains," she laughed.  "The poor things are crazy and
not really accountable.  Their odd ways and manners troubled me at
first, but I soon got over it.  I have even been in to see them.
That was to keep them from coming here.  I think if you were to
call upon them they would leave you alone after that.  They are
very fond of being called on.  They are persons of the highest
gentility, you know.  They owned this house a few years ago, as
well as the one they are now living in, but misfortunes overtook
them and this one was sold for debt.  I am very sorry for them
myself.  Sometimes I think they have not enough to eat."

"Tell me about them," I urged.  Lightly as she treated the topic I
felt convinced that these strange neighbors of hers were more or
less involved in the mystery of her own peculiar moods and
unaccountable fears.

"It's a great secret," she announced naively.  "That is, their
personal history.  I have never told it to any one.  I have never
told it to my husband.  They confided it to me in a sort of
desperation, perhaps because my husband's name inspired them with
confidence.  Immediately after, I could see that they regretted the
impulse, and so I have remained silent.  But I feel like telling
you; feel as if it would divert me to do so--keep me from thinking
of other things.  You won't want to talk about it and the story
will cure your nervousness."

"Do you want me to promise not to talk about it?" I inquired in
some anxiety.

"No.  You have a good, true face; a face which immediately inspires
confidence.  I shall exact no promises.  I can rely on your
judgment."

I thanked her.  I was glad not to be obliged to promise secrecy.
It might become my imperative duty to disregard such a promise.

"You have seen both of their faces?" she asked.

I nodded.

"Then you must have observed the difference between them.  There is
the same difference in their minds, though both are clouded.  One
is weak almost to the point of idiocy, though strong enough where
her one settled idea is concerned.  The other was once a notable
character, but her fine traits have almost vanished under the spell
which has been laid upon them by the immense disappointment which
has wrecked both their lives.  I heard it all from Miss Thankful
the day after we entered this house.  Miss Thankful is the older
and more intellectual one.  I had known very little about them
before; no more, in fact, than I have already told you.  I was
consequently much astonished when they called, for I had supposed
them to be veritable recluses, but I was still more astonished when
I noted their manner and the agitated and strangely penetrating
looks they cast about them as I ushered them into the library,
which was the only room I had had time to arrange.  A few minutes'
further observation of them showed me that neither of them was
quite right.  Instead of entering into conversation with me they
continued to cast restless glances at the walls, ceilings, and even
at the floor of the room in which we sat, and when, in the hope of
attracting their attention to myself, I addressed them on some
topic which I thought would be interesting to them, they not only
failed to listen, but turned upon each other with slowly wagging
heads, which not only revealed their condition but awakened me to
its probable cause.  They were between walls rendered dear by old
associations.  Till their first agitation was over I could not hope
for their attention.

"But their agitation gave no signs of diminishing and I soon saw
that their visit was far from being a ceremonial one; that it was
one of definite purpose.  Preparing myself for I knew not what, I
regarded them with such open interest that before I knew it, and
quite before I was ready for any such exhibition, they were both on
their knees before me, holding up their meager arms with beseeching
and babbling words which I did not understand till later.

"I was shocked, as you may believe, and quickly raised them, at
which Miss Thankful told me their story, which I will now tell you.

"There were four of them originally, three sisters and one brother.
The brother early went West and disappeared out of their lives, and
the third sister married.  This was years and years ago, when they
were all young.  From this marriage sprang all their misfortune.
The nephew which this marriage introduced to their family became
their bane as well as their delight.  From being a careless
spendthrift boy he became a reckless, scheming man, adding
extravagance to extravagance, till, to support him and meet his
debts, these poor aunts gave up first their luxuries, then their
home and finally their very livelihood.  Not that they acknowledged
this.  The feeling they both cherished for him was more akin to
infatuation than to ordinary family love.  They did not miss their
luxuries, they did not mourn their home, they did not even mourn
their privations; but they were broken-hearted and had been so for
a long time, because they could no longer do for him as of old.
Shabby themselves, and evidently ill-nourished, they grieved not
over their own changed lot, but over his.  They could not be
reconciled to his lack of luxuries, much less to the difficulties
in which he frequently found himself, who was made to ruffle it
with the best and be the pride of their lives as he was the darling
of their hearts.  All this the poor old things made apparent to me,
but their story did not become really interesting till they began
to speak of this house we are in, and of certain events which
followed their removal to the ramshackle dwelling next door.  The
sale of this portion of the property had relieved them from their
debts, but they were otherwise penniless, and were just planning
the renting of their rooms at prices which would barely serve to
provide them with a scanty living, when there came a letter from
their graceless nephew, asking for a large amount of money to save
him from complete disgrace.  They had no money, and were in the
midst of their sorrow and perplexity, when a carriage drove up to
the door of this house and from it issued an old and very sick man,
their long absent and almost forgotten brother.  He had come home
to die, and when told his sisters' circumstances, and how soon the
house next door would be filled with lodgers, insisted upon having
this place of his birth, which was empty at the time, opened for
his use.  The owner, after long continued entreaties from the poor
old sisters, finally consented to the arrangement.  A bed was made
up in the library, and the old man laid on it."

Mrs. Packard's voice fell, and I cast her a humorous look.

"Were there ghosts in those days?" I lightly asked.

Her answer was calm enough. "Not yet, but the place must have been
desolate enough for one.  I have sometimes tried to imagine the
scene surrounding that broken-down old man.  There was no furniture
in the room, save what was indispensable to his bare comfort.  Miss
Thankful expressly said there was no carpet,--you will presently
see why.  Even the windows had no other protection than the bare
shutters.  But he was in his old home, and seemed content till Miss
Charity fell sick, and they had to call in a nurse to assist Miss
Thankful, who by this time had a dozen lodgers to look after.  Then
he grew very restless.  Miss Thankful said he seemed to be afraid
of this nurse, and always had a fever after having been left alone
with her; but he gave no reason for his fears, and she herself was
too straitened in means and in too much trouble otherwise to be
affected by such mere whims, and went on doing her best, sitting
with him whenever the opportunity offered, and making every effort
to conceal the anxiety she felt for her poor nephew from her
equally poor brother.  The disease under which the brother labored
was a fatal one, and he had not many days to live.  She was
startled when one day her brother greeted her appearance, with an
earnest entreaty for the nurse to be sent out for a little while,
as this was his last day, and he had something of great importance
to communicate to her before he died.

"She had not dreamed of his being so low as this, but when she came
to look at him, she saw, that he had not misstated his case, and
that he was really very near death.  She was in a flurry and wanted
to call in the neighbors and rout her sister up from her own sick
bed to care for him.  But he wanted nothing and nobody, only to be
left alone with her.

"So she sent the nurse out and sat down on the side of the bed to
hear what he had to say to her, for he looked very eager and was
smiling in a way to make her heart ache.

"You must remember," continued Mrs. Packard, "that at the time Miss
Thankful was telling this story we were in the very room where it
had all happened.  As she reached this part of her narration, she
pointed to the wall partitioning off the corridor, and explained
that this was where the bed stood,--an old wooden one brought down
from her own attic.

"'It creaked when I sat down on it,' said she, 'and I remember that
I felt ashamed of its shabby mattress and the poor sheets.  But we
had no better,' she moaned, 'and he did not seem to mind.'  I tell
you this that you may understand what must have taken place in her
heart when, a few minutes later, he seized her hand in his and said
that he had a great secret to communicate to her.  Though he had
seemed the indifferent brother for years, his heart had always been
with his home and his people, and he was going to prove it to her
now; he had made money, and this money was to be hers and
Charity's.  He had saved it for them, brought it to them from the
far West; a pile of money all honestly earned, which he hoped would
buy back their old house and make them happy again in the old way.
He said nothing of his nephew.  They had not mentioned him, and
possibly he did not even know of his existence.  All was to be for
them and the old house, this old house.  This was perhaps why he
was content to lie in the midst of its desolation.  He foresaw
better days for those he loved, and warmed his heart at his
precious secret.

"But his sister sat aghast.  Money! and so little done for his
comfort!  That was her first thought.  The next, oh, the wonder and
the hope of it!  Now the boy could be saved; now he could have his
luxuries.  If only it might be enough!  Five thousand, ten
thousand.  But no, it could not be so much.  Her brother was daft
to think she could restore the old home on what he had been able to
save.  She said something to show her doubt, at which he laughed;
and, peering slowly and painfully about him, drew her hands toward
his left side.  'Feel,' said he, 'I have it all here.  I would
trust nobody.  Fifty, thousand dollars.'

"Fifty thousand dollars!  Miss Thankful sprang to her feet, then
sat again, overcome by her delight.  Placing her hand on the
wallet he held tied about his body, she whispered, 'Here?'

"He nodded and bade her look.  She told me she did so; that she
opened the wallet under his eye and took out five bonds each for
ten thousand dollars.  She remembers them well; there was no
mistake in the figures.  She held fifty thousand dollars in her
hands for the space of half a minute; then he bade her put them
back, with an injunction to watch over him well and not to let that
woman nurse come near him till she had taken away the wallet
immediately after his death.  He could not bear to part with it
while alive.

"She promised.  She was in a delirium of joy.  In one minute her
life of poverty had changed to one of ecstatic hope.  She caressed
her brother.  He smiled contentedly, and sank into coma or heavy
sleep.  She remained a few minutes watching him.  Picture after
picture of future contentment passed before her eyes;
phantasmagoria of joy which held her enthralled till chance drew
her eyes towards the window, and she found herself looking out upon
what for the moment seemed the continuation of her dream.  This was
the figure of her nephew, standing in the doorway of the adjoining
house.  This entrance into the alley is closed up now, but in those
days it was a constant source of communication between the two
houses, and, being directly opposite the left-hand library window,
would naturally fall under her eye as she looked up from her
brother's bedside.  Her nephew! the one person of whom she was
dreaming, for whom she was planning, older by many years than when
she saw him last, but recognizable at once, as the best, the
handsomest--but I will spare you her ravings.  She was certainly in
her dotage as concerned this man.

"He was not alone.  At his side stood her sister, eagerly pointing
across the alley to herself.  It was the appearance of the sister
which presently convinced her that what she saw was reality and no
dream.  Charity had risen from her bed to greet the newcomer, and
her hasty toilet was not one which could have been easily imagine,
even by her sister.  The long-absent one had returned.  He was
there, and he did not know what these last five minutes had done
for them all.  The joy of what she had to tell him was too much for
her discretion.  Noting how profoundly her brother slept, she
slipped out of the room to the side door and ran across the alley
to her own house.  Her nephew was no longer in the doorway where
she had seen him, but he had left the door ajar and she rushed in
to find him.  He was in the parlor with Miss Charity, and no sooner
did her eyes fall on them both than her full heart overflowed, and
she blurted out their good fortune.  Their wonder was immense and
in the conversation which ensued unnoted minutes passed.  Not till
the clock struck did she realize that she had left her brother
alone for a good half-hour: This was not right and she went
hurrying back, the happiest woman in town.  But it was a short-
lived happiness.  As she reentered the sick-room she realized that
something was amiss.  Her brother had moved from where she had left
him, and now lay stretched across the foot of the bed, where he had
evidently fallen from a standing position.  He was still breathing,
but in great gasps which shook the bed.  When she bent over him in
anxious questioning, he answered her with a ghastly stare, and that
was all.  Otherwise, everything looked the same.

"'What has happened?  What have you done?' she persisted, trying to
draw him up on the pillow.  He made a motion.  It was in the
direction of the front door.  'Don't let her in,' he muttered.  'I
don't trust her, I don't trust her.  Let me die in peace.'  Then,
as Miss Thankful became conscious of a stir at the front door, and
caught the sound of a key turning in the lock, which could only
betoken the return of the nurse, he raised himself a little and she
saw the wallet hanging out of his dressing gown.  'I have hidden
it,' he whispered, with a nervous look toward the door: 'I was
afraid she might come and take it from me, so I put it in--'  He
never said where.  His eyes, open and staring straight before him,
took on a look of horror, then slowly glazed under the terrified
glance of Miss Thankful.  Death had cut short that vital sentence,
and simultaneously with the entrance of the nurse, whose return he
had so much feared, he uttered his last gasp and sank back lifeless
on his pillow.  "With a cry Miss Thankful pounced on the wallet.
It opened out flat in her hand, as empty as her life seemed at that
minute.  But she was a brave woman and in another instant her
courage had revived.  The money could not be far away; she would
find it at the first search.  Turning on the nurse, she looked her
full in the face.  The woman was gazing at the empty wallet.  'You
know what was in that?' queried Miss Thankful.  A fierce look
answered her.  'A thousand dollars!' announced Miss Thankful.  The
nurse's lip curled.  'Oh, you knew that it was five,' was Miss
Thankful's next outburst.  Still no answer, but a look which seemed
to devour the empty wallet.  This look had its effect.  Miss
Thankful dropped her accusatory tone, and attempted cajolery.  'It
was his legacy to us,' she explained.  'He gave it to me just
before he died.  You shall be paid out of it.  Now will you call my
sister?  She's up and with my nephew, who came an hour ago.  Call
them both; I am not afraid to remain here for a few moments with my
brother's body.'  This appeal, or perhaps the promise, had its
effect.  The nurse disappeared, after another careful look at her
patient, and Miss Thankful bounded to her feet and began a hurried
search for the missing bonds.  They could not be far away.  They
must be in the room, and the room was so nearly empty that it would
take but a moment to penetrate every hiding-place.  But alas! the
matter was not so simple as she thought.  She looked here, she
looked there; in the bed, in the washstand drawer, under the
cushions of the only chair, even in the grate and up the chimney;
but she found nothing--nothing!  She was standing stark and open-
mouthed in the middle of the floor, when the others entered, but
recovered herself at sight of their surprise, and, explaining what
had happened, set them all to search, sister, nephew, even the
nurse, though she was careful to keep close by the latter with a
watchfulness that let no movement escape her.  But it was all
fruitless.  The bonds were not to be found, either in that room or
in any place near.  They ransacked, they rummaged; they went
upstairs, they went down; they searched every likely and every
unlikely place of concealment, but without avail.  They failed to
come upon the place where he had hidden them; nor did Miss Thankful
or her sister ever see them again from that day to this."

"Oh!" I exclaimed; "and the nephew? the nurse?"

"Both went away disappointed; he to face his disgrace about which
his aunts were very reticent, and she to seek work which was all
the more necessary to her, since she had lost her pay, with the
disappearance of these bonds, whose value I have no doubt she knew
and calculated on."

"And the aunts, the two poor old creatures who stare all day out of
their upper window at these walls, still believe that money to be
here," I cried.

"Yes, that is their mania.  Several tenants have occupied these
premises--tenants who have not stayed long, but who certainly
filled all the rooms, and must have penetrated every secret spot
the house contains, but it has made no difference to them.  They
believe the bonds to be still lying in some out-of-the-way place in
these old walls, and are jealous of any one who comes in here.
This you can understand better when I tell you that one feature of
their mania is this: they have lost all sense of time.  It is two
years since their brother died, yet to them it is an affair of
yesterday.  They showed this when they talked to me.  What they
wanted was for me to give up these bonds to them as soon as I found
them.  They seemed to think that I might run across them in
settling, and made me promise to wake them day or night if I came
across them unexpectedly."

"How pathetic!" I exclaimed.  "Do you suppose they have appealed in
the same way to every one who has come in here?"

"No, or some whisper of this lost money would have become current
in the neighborhood.  And it never has.  The traditions associated
with the house," here her manner changed a little, "are of quite
another nature.  I suppose the old gentleman has walked--looking,
possibly, for his lost bonds."

"That would be only natural," I smiled, for her mood was far from
serious.  "But," I quietly pursued, "how much of this old woman's
story do you believe?  Can not she have been deceived as to what
she saw?  You say she is more or less demented.  Perhaps there
never was any old wallet, and possibly never any money."

"I have seen the wallet.  They brought it in to show me.  Not that
that proves anything; but somehow I do believe in the money, and,
what is more, that it is still in this house.  You will think me as
demented as they."

"No, no," I smiled, "for I am inclined to think the same; it lends
such an interest to the place.  I wouldn't disbelieve it now for
anything."

"Nor I," she cried, taking up her work.  "But we shall never find
it.  The house was all redecorated when we came in.  Not one of the
workmen has become suddenly wealthy."

"I shall no longer begrudge these poor old souls their silent watch
over these walls that hold their treasure," I now remarked.

"Then you have lost your nervousness?"

"Quite."

"So have I," laughed Mrs. Packard, showing me for the first time a
face of complete complacency and contentment.




CHAPTER VI

AT THE STAIR-HEAD


I spent the evening alone.  Mrs. Packard went to the theater with
friends and Mayor Packard attended a conference of politicians.  I
felt my loneliness, but busied myself trying to sift the
impressions made upon me by the different members of the household.

It consisted, as far as my present observation went, of seven
persons, the three principals and four servants.  Of the servants
I had seen three, the old butler, the nurse, and the housemaid,
Ellen.  I now liked Ellen; she appeared equally alive and
trustworthy; of the butler I could not say as much.  He struck me
as secretive.  Also, he had begun to manifest a certain antagonism
to myself.  Whence sprang this antagonism?  Did it have its source
in my temperament, or in his?  A question possibly not worth
answering and yet it very well might be.  Who could know?

Pondering this and other subjects, I remained in my cozy little
room up-stairs, till the clock verging on to twelve told me that it
was nearly time for Mrs. Packard's return.

Hardly knowing my duties as yet, or what she might expect of me, I
kept my door open, meaning to speak to her when she came in.  The
thought had crossed my mind that she might not return at all, but
remain away with her friends.  Some fear of this kind had been in
Mr. Packard's mind and naturally found lodgment in mine.  I was
therefore much relieved when, sharp on the stroke of midnight, I
heard the front door-bell ring, followed by the sound of her voice
speaking to the old butler.  I thought its tone more cheerful than
before she went out.  At all events, her face had a natural look
when, after a few minutes' delay, she came upstairs and stepped
into the nursery--a room on the same floor as mine, but nearer the
stair-head.

From what impulse did I put out my light?  I think now, on looking
back, that I hoped to catch a better glimpse of her face when she
came out again, and so be in a position to judge whether her
anxiety or secret distress was in any special way connected with
her child.  But I forgot the child and any motive of this kind
which I may have had; for when Mrs. Packard did reappear in the
hall, there rang up from some place below a laugh, so loud and
derisive and of so raucous and threatening a tone that Mrs. Packard
reeled with the shock and I myself was surprised in spite of my
pride and usual impassibility. This, had it been all, would not be
worth the comment.  But it was not all.  Mrs. Packard did not
recover from the shock as I expected her to.  Her fine figure
straightened itself, it is true, but only to sink again lower and
lower, till she clung crouching to the stair-rail at which she had
caught for support, while her eyes, turning slowly in her head,
moved till they met mine with that unseeing and glassy stare which
speaks of a soul-piercing terror--not fear in any ordinary sense,
but terror which lays bare the soul and allows one to see into
depths which--

But here my compassion drove me to action.  Advancing quietly, I
caught at her wrap which was falling from her shoulders.  She
grasped my hand as I did so.

"Did you hear that laugh?" she panted.  "Whose was it?  Who is
down-stairs?"

I thought, "Is this one of the unaccountable occurrences which have
given the house its blighted reputation?" but I said: "Nixon let
you in.  I don't know whether any one else is below.  Mayor Packard
has not yet come home."

"I know; Nixon told me.  Would you--would you mind,"--how hard she
strove to show only the indignant curiosity natural to the
situation--"do you object, I mean, to going down and seeing?"

"Not at all," I cheerfully answered, glad enough of this chance to
settle my own doubts.  And with a last glance at her face, which
was far too white and drawn to please me, I hastened below.

The lights had not yet been put out in the halls, though I saw none
in the drawing-room or library.  Indeed, I ran upon Nixon coming
from the library, where he had evidently been attending to his
final duties of fastening windows and extinguishing lights.  Alive
to the advantage of this opportune meeting, I addressed him with as
little aggressiveness as possible.

"Mrs. Packard has sent me down to see who laughed just now so
loudly.  Was it you?"

Strong and unmistakable dislike showed in his eyes, but his voice
was restrained and apparently respectful as he replied: "No, Miss.
I didn't laugh.  There was nothing to laugh at."

"You heard the laugh?  It seemed to come from somewhere here.  I
was on the third floor and I heard it plainly."

His face twitched--a habit of his when under excitement, as I have
since learned--as with a shrug of his old shoulders he curtly
answered:

"You were listening; I was not.  If any one laughed down here I
didn't hear 'em."

Confident that he was lying, I turned quietly away and proceeded
down the hall toward Mayor Packard's study.

"I wish to speak to the mayor," I explained.

"He's not there."  The man had eagerly followed me.  "He's not come
home yet, Miss."

"But the gas is burning brightly inside and the door ajar.  Some
one is there."

"It is Mr. Steele.  He came in an hour ago.  He often works here
till after midnight."

I had heard what I wanted to know, but, being by this time at the
very threshold, I could not forbear giving the door a slight push,
so as to catch at least a momentary glimpse of the man he spoke of.

He was sitting at his post, and as he neither looked up nor stirred
at my intrusion, I had an excellent opportunity for observing again
the clear-cut profile which had roused my admiration the day
before.

Certainly, seen as I saw it now, in the concentrated glow of a lamp
shaded from every other corner of the room, it was a face well
worth looking at.  Seldom, perhaps never, had I beheld one cast in
a more faultless mold.  Smooth-shaven, with every harmonious line
open to view, it struck the eye with the force and beauty of a
cameo; masculine strength and feminine grace equally expressed in
the expansive forehead and the perfectly modeled features.  Its
effect upon the observer was instantaneous, but the heart was not
warmed nor the imagination awakened by it.  In spite of the
perfection of the features, or possibly because of this perfection,
the whole countenance had a cold look, as cold as the sculpture it
suggested; and, though incomparable in pure physical attraction, it
lacked the indefinable something which gives life and meaning to
such faces as Mayor Packard's, for instance.  Yet it was not devoid
of expression, nor did it fail to possess a meaning of its own.
Indeed, it was the meaning in it which held my attention.
Abstracted as the man appeared to be, even to the point of not
perceiving my intruding figure in the open doorway, the thoughts
which held him were not common thoughts, nor were they such as
could be easily read, even by an accustomed eye.  Having noted
this, I softly withdrew, not finding any excuse for breaking in
upon a man so occupied.

The butler stood awaiting me not three feet from the door.  But
taking a lesson from the gentleman I had just left, I ignored his
presence completely, and, tripping lightly up-stairs, found Mrs.
Packard awaiting me at the head of the first flight instead of the
second.

Her fears, or whatever it was which moved her, had not diminished
in my absence.  She stood erect, but it was by the help of her
grasp on the balustrade; and though her diamonds shone and her
whole appearance in her sweeping dinner-dress was almost regal,
there was mortal apprehension in her eye and a passion of inquiry
in her whole attitude which I was glad her husband was not there to
see.

I made haste to answer that inquiry by immediately observing:

"I saw Nixon.  He was just coming out of the library.  He says that
he heard no laugh.  The only other person I came upon down-stairs
was Mr. Steele.  He was busy over some papers and I did not like to
interrupt him; but he did not look as if a laugh of any sort had
come from him."

"Thank you."

The words were hoarsely uttered and the tone unnatural, though she
tried to carry it off with an indifferent gesture and a quick
movement toward her room.  I admired her self-control, for it was
self-control, and was contrasting the stateliness of her present
bearing with the cringing attitude of a few minutes before--when,
without warning or any premonitory sound, all that beauty and pride
and splendor collapsed before my eyes, and she fell at my feet,
senseless.




CHAPTER VII

A MOVING SHADOW


I bent to lift the prostrate form of the unhappy woman who had been
placed in my care.  As I did so I heard something like a snarl over
my shoulder, and, turning, saw Nixon stretching eager arms toward
his mistress, whose fall he had doubtless heard.

"Let me! let me!" he cried, his old form trembling almost to the
point of incapacity.

"We will lift her together," I rejoined; and though his eyes
sparkled irefully, he accepted my help and together we carried her
into her own room and laid her on a lounge.  I have had some
training as a nurse and, perceiving that Mrs. Packard had simply
fainted, I was not at all alarmed, but simply made an effort to
restore her with a calmness that for some reason greatly irritated
the old man.

"Shall I call Ellen?  Shall I call Letty?" he kept crying, shifting
from one foot to another in a frightened and fussy way that
exasperated me almost beyond endurance.  "She doesn't breathe; she
is white, white!   Oh, what will the mayor say?  I will call
Letty."

But I managed to keep him under control and finally succeeded in
restoring Mrs. Packard--a double task demanding not a little self-
control and discretion.  When the flutter of her eyelids showed
that she would soon be conscious, I pointed out these signs of life
to my uneasy companion and hinted very broadly that the fewer
people Mrs. Packard found about her on coming to herself, the
better she would be pleased.  His aspect grew quite ferocious at
this, and for a moment I almost feared him; but as I continued to
urge the necessity of avoiding any fresh cause of agitation in one
so weak, he gradually shrank back from my side where he had kept a
jealous watch until now, and reluctantly withdrew into the hall.

Another moment and Mrs. Packard had started to rise; but, on seeing
me and me only standing before her, she fell wearily back, crying
in a subdued way, which nevertheless was very intense:

"Don't, don't let him come in--see me--or know.  I must be by
myself; I must be!  Don't you see that I am frightened?"

The words came out with such force I was startled.  Leaning over
her, with the natural sympathy her condition called for, I asked
quietly but firmly:

"Whom do you mean by him?  There is only one person in the hall,
and that is your butler."

"Hasn't Mr. Packard returned?"

"No, Madam."

"But I thought I saw him looking at me."

Her eyes were wild, her body shaking with irrepressible agitation.

"You were mistaken.  Mayor Packard has not yet come home."

At this double assurance, she sank back satisfied, but still
trembling and very white.

"It is Mr. Packard I meant," she whispered presently.  "Stay with
me and, when he comes in, tell him what will keep him from looking
in or speaking to me.  Promise!"  She was growing wild again.
"Promise, if you would be of any use to me."

"I do promise."  At which I felt her hand grasp mine with grateful
pressure.  "Don't you wish some assistance from me?  Your dress--I
tried to loosen it, but failed to find the end of the cord.  Shall
I try again?"

"No, no; that is, I will do it myself."

I did not see how she could, for her waist was laced up the back,
but I saw that she was too eager to have me go to remember this,
and recognizing the undesirability of irritating her afresh, I
simply asked if she wished me to remain within call.

But even this was more than she wanted.

"No.  I am better now.  I shall be better yet when quite alone."
Then suddenly: "Who knows of this--this folly of mine?"

"Only Nixon and myself.  The girls have gone to bed."

"Nixon I can trust not to speak of it.  Tell him to go.  You, I
know, will remember only long enough to do for me what I have just
asked."

"Mrs. Packard, you may trust me."  The earnest, confiding look,
which for a moment disturbed the melancholy of her large eyes,
touched me closely as I shut the door between us.

"Now what is the meaning of this mystery?" I asked myself after I
had seen Nixon go downstairs, shaking his head and casting every
now and then a suspicious glance behind him.  "It is not as trivial
as it appears.  That laugh was tragedy to her, not comedy."  And
when I paused to recollect its tone I did not wonder at its effect
upon her mind, strained as it undoubtedly was by some secret sorrow
or perplexity.

And from whose lips had that laugh sprung?  Not from ghostly ones.
Such an explanation I could not accept, and how could Mrs. Packard?
From whose, then?  If I could settle this fact I might perhaps
determine to what extent its effect was dependent upon its source.
The butler denied having even heard it.  Was this to be believed?
Did not this very denial prove that it was he and no other who
had thus shocked the proprieties of this orderly household?  It
certainly seemed so; yet where all was strange, this strange and
incomprehensible denial of a self-evident fact by the vindictive
Nixon might have its source in some motive unsuggested by the
circumstances.  Certainly, Nixon's mistress appeared to have a
great deal of confidence in him.

I wished that more had been told me about the handsome secretary.
I wished that fate would give me another opportunity for seeing
that gentleman and putting the same direct question to him I had
put to Nixon.

Scarcely had this thought crossed my mind before a loud ring at the
telephone disturbed the quiet below and I heard the secretary's
voice in reply.  A minute after he appeared at the foot of the
stairs.  His aspect was one of embarrassment, and he peered aloft
in a hesitating way, as if he hardly knew how to proceed.

Taking advantage of this hesitation, I ran softly down to meet him.

"Any message for Mrs. Packard?" I asked.

He looked relieved.

"Yes, from his Honor.  The mayor is unavoidably detained and may
not be home till morning."

"I will tell her."  Then, as he reached for his overcoat, I risked
all on one venture, and enlarging a little on the facts, said:

"Excuse me, but was it you we heard laughing down-stairs a few
minutes ago?  Mrs. Packard feared it might be some follower of the
girls'."

Pausing in the act of putting on his coat, he met my look with an
air of some surprise.

"I am not given to laughing," he remarked; "certainly not when
alone."

"But you heard this laugh?"

He shook his head.  His manner was perfectly courteous, almost
cordial.

"If I did, it made no impression on my mind.  I am extremely busy
just now, working up the mayor's next speech."  And with a smile
and bow in every way suited to his fine appearance, he took his hat
from the rack and left the house.

I drew back more mystified than ever.  Which of these two men had
told me a lie?  One, both, or neither?  Impossible to determine.
As I try never to waste gray matter, I resolved to spend no further
energy on this question, but simply to await the next development.

It came unexpectedly and was of an entirely different nature from
any I had anticipated.

I had not retired, not knowing at what moment the mayor might
return or what I might be called upon to do when he did.  It will
be remembered that one of my windows looked out upon the next
house.  I approached it to see if my ever watchful neighbors had
retired.  Their window was dark, but I observed what was of much
more vital interest to me at that moment.  It was that I was not
the only one awake and stirring in our house.  The light from a
room diagonally below me poured in a stream on the opposite wall,
and it took but a moment's consideration for me to decide that the
shadow I saw crossing and recrossing this brilliant square was cast
by Mrs. Packard.

My first impulse was to draw back--(that was the lady's impulse not
quite crushed out of me by the occupation circumstances had
compelled me to take up)--my next, to put out my own light and seat
myself at the post of observation thus afforded me.  The excuse I
gave myself for this was plausible enough.  Mrs. Packard had been
placed in my charge and, if all was not right with her, it was my
business to know it.

Accordingly I sat and watched each movement of my mysterious charge
as it was outlined on the telltale wall before me, and saw enough
in one half-hour to convince me that something very vigorous and
purposeful was going on in the room so determinedly closed against
every one, even her own husband.

What?

The moving silhouette of her figure, which was all that I could see,
was not perfect enough in detail for me to determine. She was busy at
some occupation which took her from one end of the room to the other;
but after watching her shadow for an hour I was no surer than at
first as to what that occupation was. It was a serious one, I saw,
and now and then the movements I watched gave evidence of frantic
haste, but their character stood unrevealed till suddenly the thought
came:

"She is rummaging bureau-drawers and emptying boxes,--in other
words, packing a bag or trunk."

Should I be witness to a flight?  I thought it very likely,
especially when I heard the faint sound of a door opening below,
followed by the swish of silken skirts.  I recalled Mayor Packard's
fears and began to suspect that they were not groundless.

This called for action, and I was about to open my door and rush
out when I was deterred by the surprising discovery that the steps
I heard were coming up rather than going down, and that in another
moment she would be in the hall outside, possibly on her way to the
nursery, possibly with the intention of coming to my own room.

Greatly taken aback, I stood with my ear to the door, listening
intently.  Yes, she has reached the top of the stairs and is
stopping no, she passes the nursery door, she is coming my way.
What shall I say to her,--how account for my comfortable wrapper
and the fact that I have not yet been abed?  Had I but locked my
door!  Could I but lock it now, unseen and unheard before the
nearing step should pause!  But the very attempt were folly; no, I
must stand my ground and--Ah! the step has paused, but not at my
door.  There is a third one on this hall, communicating, as I knew,
with a covered staircase leading to the attic.  It was at this she
stopped and it was up this staircase she went as warily and softly
as its creaking boards would allow; and while I marveled as to what
had taken her aloft so late, I heard her steps over my head and
knew that she had entered the room directly above mine.

Striking a match, I consulted my watch.  It was just ten minutes to
three.  Hardly knowing what my duty was in the circumstances, I
blew out the match and stood listening while the woman who was such
a mystery to all her friends moved about overhead in much the same
quick and purposeful way as had put life into her shadow while she
was in her own room.

"Packing!  Nothing less and nothing more," was my now definite
decision.  "That is a trunk she is dragging forward.  What a hurry
she is in, and how little she cares whether anybody hears her!"

So little did she care that during the next few minutes of acute
attention I distinguished the flinging down of article after
article on to the floor, as well as many other movements betraying
haste or irritation.

Suddenly I heard her give a bound, then the sound of a heavy lid
falling and then, after a minute or two of complete silence, the
soft pat-pat of her slippered feet descending the stair.

Half-past three.

Waiting till she was well down the second flight, I pushed my door
ajar and, flying down the hall, peered over the balustrade in time
to see her entering her room.  She held a lighted candle in her
hand and by its small flame I caught a full glimpse of her figure.
To my astonishment and even to my dismay she was still in the gown
she had refused to have me unlace,--a rich yellow satin in which
she must have shone resplendent a few hours before.  She had not
even removed the jewels from her neck.  Whatever had occupied her,
whatever had taken her hither and thither through the house, moving
furniture out of her way, lifting heavy boxes, opening dust-covered
trunks, had been of such moment to her as to make her entirely
oblivious of the rich and delicate apparel she thus wantonly
sacrificed.  But it was not this alone which attracted my
attention.  In her hand she held a paper, and the sight of that
paper and the way she clutched it rather disturbed my late
conclusions.  Had her errand been one of search rather than of
arrangement? and was this crumpled letter the sole result of a
half-hour's ransacking in an attic room at the dead of night?  I
was fain to think so, for in the course of another half-hour her
light went out.  Relieved that she had not left the house, I was
still anxious as to the cause of her strange conduct.

Mayor Packard did not come in till daybreak.  He found me waiting
for him in the lower hall.

"Well?" he eagerly inquired.

"Mrs. Packard is asleep, I hope.  A shrill laugh, ringing through
the house shortly after her return, gave her a nervous shock and
she begged that she might be left undisturbed till morning."

He turned from hanging up his overcoat, and gave me a short stare.

"A laugh!" he repeated.  "Who could have laughed like that?  We are
not a very jolly crowd here."

"I don't know, sir. I thought it must have been either Mr. Steele
or Nixon, the butler, but each denied it.  There was no one else in
this part of the house."

"Mrs. Packard is very sensitive just now," he remarked.  Then as he
turned away toward the library door: "I will throw myself on a
lounge.  I have but an hour or two before me, as I have my
preparations to make for leaving town on the early morning train.
I shall have some final instructions to give you."




CHAPTER VIII

THE PARAGRAPH


I was up betimes.  Would Mrs. Packard appear at breakfast?  I
hardly thought so.  Yet who knows?  Such women have great
recuperative powers, and from one so mysteriously affected anything
might be expected.  Ready at eight, I hastened down to the second
floor to find the lady, concerning whom I had had these doubts,
awaiting me on the threshold of her room.  She was carefully
dressed and looked pale enough to have been up for hours.  An
envelope was in her hand, and the smile which hailed my approach
was cold and constrained.

"Good morning," said she.  "Let us go down.  Let us go down
together.  I slept wretchedly and do not feel very strong.  When
did Mr. Packard come in?"

"Late.  He went directly to the library.  He said that he had
but a short time in which to rest, and would take what sleep he
could get on the lounge, when I told him of your very natural
nervous attack."

She sighed--a sigh which came from no inconsiderable depths--then
with a proud and resolute gesture preceded me down-stairs.

Her husband was already in the breakfast-room.  I could hear his
voice as we turned at the foot of the stairs.  Mrs. Packard,
hearing it, too, drew herself up still more firmly and was passing
bravely forward, when Nixon's gray head protruded from the doorway
and I heard him say:

"There's company for breakfast, ma'am.  His Honor could not spare
Mr. Steele and asked me to set a place for him."

I noted a momentary hesitation on Mrs. Packard's part, then she
silently acquiesced and we both passed on.  In another instant we
were receiving the greetings and apologies of the gentlemen.  If
Mr. Steele had expected that his employer's wife would offer him
her hand, he was disappointed.

"I am happy to welcome one who has proved so useful to my husband,"
she remarked with cool though careful courtesy as we all sat down
at the table; and, without waiting for an answer, she proceeded to
pour the coffee with a proud grace which gave no hint of the
extreme feeling by which I had seen her moved the night before.

Had I known her better I might have found something extremely
unnatural in her manner and the very evident restraint she put upon
herself through the whole meal; but not having any acquaintance
with her ordinary bearing under conditions purely social, I was
thrown out of my calculations by the cold ease with which she
presided at her end of the table, and the set smile with which she
greeted all remarks, whether volunteered by her husband or by his
respectful but affable secretary.  I noticed, however, that she ate
little.

Nixon, whom I dared not watch, did not serve with his usual
precision,--this I perceived from the surprised look cast at him by
Mayor Packard on at least two occasions.  Though to the ordinary
eye a commonplace meal, it had elements of tragedy in it which made
the least movement on the part of those engaged in it of real
moment to me.  I was about to leave the table unenlightened,
however, when Mrs. Packard rose and, drawing a letter from under
the tray before which she sat, let her glances pass from one
gentleman to the other with a look of decided inquiry.  I drew in
my breath and by dropping my handkerchief sought an excuse for
lingering in the room an instant longer.

"Will--may I ask one of you," she stammered with her first show of
embarrassment during the meal, "to--to post this letter for me?"

Both gentlemen were standing and both gentlemen reached for it; but
it was into the secretary's hand she put it, though her husband's
was much the nearer.  As Mr. Steele received it he gave it the
casual glance natural under the circumstances,--a glance which
instantly, however, took on an air of surprise that ended in a
smile.

"Have you not made some mistake?" he asked.

"This does not look like a letter."  And he handed her back the
paper she had given him. With an involuntary ingathering of her
breath, she seemed to wake out of some dream and, looking down at
the envelope she held, she crushed it in her hand with a little
laugh in which I heard the note of real gaiety for the first time.

"Pardon me," she exclaimed; and, meeting his amused gaze with one
equally expressive, she carelessly added: "I certainly brought a
letter down with me."

Bowing pleasantly, but with that indefinable air of respect which
bespeaks the stranger, he waited while she hastened back to the
tray and drew from under it a second paper.

"Pardon my carelessness," she said.  "I must have caught up a
scrawl of the baby's in taking this from my desk."

She brought forward a letter and ended the whole remarkable episode
by handing it now to her husband, who, with an apologetic glance at
the other, put it in his pocket.

I say remarkable; for in the folded slip which had passed back and
forth between her and the secretary, I saw, or thought I saw, a
likeness to the paper she had brought the night before out of the
attic.

If Mayor Packard saw anything unusual in his wife's action he made
no mention of it when I went into his study at nine o'clock.  And
it was so much of an enigma to me that I was not ready to venture
a question regarding it.

Her increased spirits and more natural conduct were the theme of
the few sentences he addressed me, and while he urged precaution
and a continued watch upon his wife, he expressed the fondest hope
that he should find her fully restored on his return at the end of
two weeks.

I encouraged his hopes, and possibly shared them; but I changed my
mind, as he probably did his, when a few minutes later we met her
in the hall hurrying toward us with a newspaper in her hand and a
ghastly look on her face.  "See! see! what they have dared to
print!" she  cried, with a look, full of anguish, into his
bewildered face.

He took the sheet, read, and flushed, then suddenly grew white.
"Outrageous!" he exclaimed.  Then tenderly, "My poor darling! that
they should dare to drag your name into this abominable campaign!"

"And for no reason," she faltered; "there is nothing wrong with me.
You believe that; you are sure of that," she cried. I saw the
article later.  It ran something like this:

"Rumor has it that not even our genial mayor's closet is free from
the proverbial skeleton.  Mrs. Packard's health is not what it
was,--and some say that the causes are not purely physical."

He tried to dissimulate.  Putting his arm about her, he kissed her
fondly and protested with mingled energy and feeling:

"I believe you to be all you should be--a true woman and true
wife."

Her face lighted and she clung for a moment in passionate delight
to his breast; then she caught his look, which was tender but not
altogether open, and the shadows fell again as she murmured:

"You are not satisfied.  Oh, what do you see, what do others see,
that I should be the subject of doubt?  Tell me!  I can never right
myself till I know."

"I see a troubled face when I should see a happy one," he answered
lightly; then, as she still clung in very evident question to his
arm, he observed gravely:  "Two weeks ago you were the life of this
house, and of every other house into which your duties carried you.
Why shouldn't you be the same to-day?  Answer me that, dear, and
all my doubts will vanish, I assure you."

"Henry,"--drooping her head and lacing her fingers in and out with
nervous hesitation,--"you will think me very foolish,--I know that
it will sound foolish, childish even, and utterly ridiculous; but
I can explain myself no other way.  I have had a frightful
experience--here--in my own house--on the spot where I have been
so happy, so unthinkingly happy.  Henry--do not laugh--it is real,
very real, to me.  The specter which is said to haunt these walls
has revealed itself to me.  I have seen the ghost."




CHAPTER IX

SCRAPS


We did not laugh; we did not even question her sanity; at least I
did not; there was too much meaning in her manner.

"A specter," her husband repeated with a suggestive glance at the
brilliant sunshine in which we all stood.

"Yes."  The tone was one of utter conviction.  "I had never
believed in such things--never thought about them, but--it was a
week ago--in the library--I have not seen a happy moment since--"

"My darling!"

"Yes, yes, I know; but imagine!  I was sitting reading.  I had just
come from the nursery, and the memory of Laura's good-night kiss
was more in my mind than the story I was finishing when--oh, I can
not think of it without a shudder!--the page before me seemed to
recede and the words fade away in a blue mist; glancing up I beheld
the outlines of a form between me and the lamp.  which a moment
before had been burning brightly.  Outlines, Henry,--I was
conscious of no substance, and the eyes which met mine from that
shadowy, blood-curdling Something were those of the grave and meant
a grave for you or for me.  Oh, I know what I say!  There was no
mistaking their look.  As it burned into and through me, everything
which had given reality to my life faded and seemed as far away and
as unsubstantial as a dream.  Nor has its power over me gone yet.
I go about amongst you, I eat, I sleep, or try to; I greet men,
talk with women, but it is all unreal, all phantasmagoric, even
yourself and your love and, O God, my baby!  What is real and
distinctive, an absolute part of me and my life, is that shape from
the dead, with its threatening eyes which pierce--pierce--"

She was losing her self-control.  Her husband, with a soothing
touch on her arm, brought her back to the present.

"You speak of a form," he said, "a shadowy outline.  The form of
what?  A man or a woman?"

"A man! a man!"  With the exclamation she seemed to shrink into
herself and her eyes, just now deprecating and appealing, took on
a hollow stare, as if the vision she described had risen again
before her.

In spite of himself and the sympathy he undoubtedly felt for her,
an ejaculation of impatience left her husband's lips.  Obligations
very far removed from the fantasies of a disturbed mind made these
unsubstantial fears of hers seem puerile enough to this virile,
outspoken man.  No doubt she heard it, and to stop the matter-of-
fact protest on his lips added quickly:

"Not the form, face and eyes of a man, as they usually appear. Hell
was in his gaze and the message he gave, if it was a message, was one
of disaster, if not death. Do you wonder that my happiness vanished
before it? That I can not be myself since that dreadful day?"

The mayor was a practical man; he kept close to the subject.

"You saw this form between you and the lighted lamp.  How long did
it stay there and what became of it?"

"I can not tell you.  One moment it was there and the next it was
gone, and I found myself staring into vacancy.  I seem to be
staring there still, waiting for the blow destined to shatter this
household."

"Nonsense! give me a kiss and fix your thoughts on something more
substantial.  What we have to fear and all we have to fear is that
I may lose my election.  And that won't kill me, whatever effect it
may have on the party."

"Henry,"--her voice had changed to one more natural, also her
manner.  The confidence expressed in this outburst, the vitality,
the masculine attitude he took were producing their effect.  "You
don't believe in what I saw or in my fears.  Perhaps you are right.
I am ready to acknowledge this; I will try to look upon it all as
a freak of my imagination if you will promise to forget these
dreadful days, and if people, other people, will leave me alone and
not print such things about me."

"I am ready to do my part," was his glad reply, "and as for the
other people you mention, we shall soon bring them to book."
Raising his voice, he called out his secretary's name. As it rang
loud and cheery down the hall, the joy and renewed life which had
been visible in her manner lost some of their brightness.

"What are you going to do?" she gasped, with the quickness of doubt
and strong if reasonless apprehension. "Give an order," he
explained; then, as the secretary appeared at our end of the hall,
he held out the journal which he had taken from his wife and
indicating the offensive paragraph, said:

"Find out who did that."

Mr. Steele with a surprised look ran his eyes over the paragraph,
knitting his brows as he did.

"It is calumny," fell from Mrs. Packard's lips as she watched him.

"Most certainly," he assented, with an energy which brought a
flush of pleasure to the humiliated woman's cheek.  "It will detain
me two days or more to follow up this matter," he remarked, with a
look of inquiry directed at Mayor Packard.

"Never mind.  Two days or a week, it is all one.  I would rather
lose votes than pass over such an insult.  Pin me down the man who
has dared attack me through my wife, and you will do me the
greatest favor one man can show another."

Mr. Steele bowed. "I can not forego the final consultation we had
planned to hold on the train.  May I ride down with you to the
station?"

"Certainly; most happy."

Mr. Steele withdrew, after casting a glance of entirely respectful
sympathy at the woman who up to this hour had faced the world
without a shadow between her and it; and, marking the lingering
nature of the look with which the mayor now  turned on his wife, I
followed the secretary's example and left them to enjoy their few
last words alone.

Verily the pendulum of events swung wide and fast in this house.

This conclusion was brought back to me with fresh insistence a few
minutes later, when, on hearing the front door shut, I stepped to
the balustrade and looked over to see if Mrs. Packard was coming
up.  She was not, for I saw her go into the library; but plainly on
the marble pavement below, just where we had all been standing, in
fact, I perceived the piece of paper she had brought with her from
the dining-room and had doubtless dropped in the course of the
foregoing conversation.

Running down in great haste, I picked it up.  This scrap of I knew
not what, but which had been the occasion of the enigmatic scene I
had witnessed at the breakfast-table, necessarily interested me
very much and I could not help giving it a look.  I saw that it was
inscribed with Hebraic-looking characters as unlike as possible to
the scrawl of a little child.

With no means of knowing whether they were legible or not, these
characters made a surprising impression upon me, one, indeed, that
was almost photographic.

I also noted that these shapes or characters, of which there were
just seven, were written on the face of an empty envelope.  This
decided any doubts I may have had as to its identity with the paper
she had brought down from the attic.  That had been a square sheet,
which even if folded would fail to enter this long and narrow
envelope.  The interest which I had felt when I thought the two
identical was a false interest.  Yet I could not but believe that
this scrap had a value of its own equal to the one with which,
under this misapprehension, I had invested it.

Carrying it back to Mrs. Packard, I handed it over with the remark
that I had found it lying in the hall.  She cast a quick look at
it, gave me another look and tossed the paper into the grate.  As
it caught fire and flared up, the characters started vividly into
view.

This second glimpse of them, added to the one already given me,
fixed the whole indelibly in my mind.  This is the way they looked.


[]; V; []; .>; V; [-]; <;


While I watched these cabalistic marks pass from red to black and
finally vanish in a wild leap up the chimney, Mrs. Packard
remarked:

"I wish I could destroy the memory of all my mistakes as completely
as I can that old envelope."

I did not answer; I was watching the weary droop of her hand over
the arm of her chair.

"You are tired, Mrs. Packard," was my sympathetic observation.
"Will you not take a nap?  I will gladly sit by you and read you to
sleep."

"No, no," she cried, at once alert and active; "no sleep.  Look at
that pile of correspondence, half of it on charitable matters.  Now
that I feel better, now that I have relieved my mind, I must look
over my letters and try to take up the old threads again."

"Can I help you?" I asked.

"Possibly.  If you will go to my room up-stairs, I will join you
after I have sorted and read my mail."

I was glad to obey this order.  I had a curiosity about her room.
It had been the scene of much I did not understand the night
before.  Should I find any traces there of that search which had
finally ended over my head in the attic?

I was met at the door by Ellen.  She wore a look of dismay which I
felt fully accounted for when I looked inside.  Disorder reigned
from one end of the room to the other, transcending any picture I
may have formed in my own mind concerning its probable condition.
Mrs. Packard must have forgotten all this disarray, or at least had
supposed it to have yielded to the efforts of the maid, when she
proposed my awaiting her there.  There were bureau-drawers with
their contents half on the floor, boxes with their covers off,
cupboard-doors ajar and even the closet shelves showing every mark
of a frenzied search among them.  Her rich gown, soiled to the
width of half a foot around the bottom, lay with cut laces and its
trimmings in rags under a chair which had been knocked over and
left where it fell.  Even her jewels had not been put away, but lay
scattered on the dresser.  Ellen looked ashamed and, when I retired
to the one bare place I saw in the bay of the window, muttered as
she plunged to lift one of the great boxes:

"It's as bad as the attic room up-stairs.  All the trunks have been
emptied on to the floor and one held her best summer dresses.  What
shall I do?  I have a whole morning's work before me."

"Let me help you," I proposed, rising with sudden alacrity.  My
eyes had just fallen on a small desk at my right, also on the floor
beneath and around it.  Here, there and everywhere above and below
lay scraps of torn-up paper; and on many, if not on all of them,
could be seen the broken squares and inverted angles which had
marked so curiously the surface of the envelope she had handed to
Mr. Steele, and which I had afterward seen her burn.

"A baby can make a deal of mess," I remarked, hurriedly collecting
these scraps and making a motion of throwing them into the waste-
paper basket, but hiding them in my blouse instead.

"The baby!  Oh, the baby never did that.  She's too young."

"Oh, I didn't know.  I haven't seen much of the child though I
heard her cry once in the nursery.  How old is she?"

"Twenty months and such a darling!  You never saw such curls or
such eyes.  Why, look at this!"

"What?" I demanded, hurrying to the closet, where Ellen stood
bending over something invisible to me. "Oh, nothing," she
answered, coming quickly out.  But in another moment, her tongue
getting the better of her discretion, she blurted out: "Do you
suppose Mrs. Packard had any idea of going with the mayor?  Her bag
is in there almost packed.  I was wondering where all her toilet
articles were.  That accounts--"  Stopping, she cast a glance
around the room, ending with a shake of the head and a shrug.
"She needn't have pulled out all her things," she sharply
complained.  "Certain, she is a mysterious lady;--as queer as she
is kind."




CHAPTER X

A GLIMMER OF THE TRUTH


This was a sentiment I could thoroughly indorse.  Mrs. Packard was
certainly an enigma to me.  Leaving Ellen to finish her work, I
went upstairs to my own room, and, taking out the scraps of paper
I had so carefully collected, spread them out before me on the lid
of the desk.

They were absolutely unintelligible to me--marks and nothing more.
Useless to waste time over such unmeaning scrawls when I had other
and more tangible subjects to consider.  But I should not destroy
them.  There might come a time when I should be glad to give them
the attention which my present excitement forbade.  Putting them
back in my desk, I settled myself into a serious contemplation of
the one fact which seemed to give a partial if not wholly
satisfactory explanation of Mrs. Packard's peculiar conduct during
the last two weeks--her belief that she had been visited by a
specter of an unholy, threatening aspect.

That it was a belief and nothing more seemed sufficiently clear to
me in the cold-blooded analysis to which I now subjected the whole
matter.

Phantoms have no place in the economy of nature.  That Mrs. Packard
thought herself the victim of one was simply a proof of how deeply,
though perhaps unconsciously, she had been affected by the
traditions of the house.  Such sensitiveness in a mind naturally
firm and uncommonly well poised, called for attention.  Yet a
physician had asserted that he could do nothing for her.  Granting
that he was mistaken, would an interference of so direct and
unmistakable a character be wise in the present highly strung
condition of her nerves?  I doubted it.  It would show too plainly
the light in which we regarded her.  I dared not undertake the
responsibility of such a course in Mayor Packard's absence.  Some
other way must be found to quiet her apprehensions and bring her
into harmony again with her surroundings.  I knew of only one
course.  If the influence of the house had brought on this
hallucination, then the influence of the house must be destroyed.
She must be made to see that, despite its unfortunate reputation,
no specter had ever visited it; that some purely natural cause was
at the bottom of the various manifestations which had successively
driven away all previous tenants.

Could I hope to effect this?  It was an undertaking of no small
moment.  Had I the necessary judgment?  I doubted it, but my
ambition was roused.  While Mr. Steele was devoting himself to the
discovery of Mayor and Mrs. Packard's political enemy, I would
essay the more difficult task of penetrating the mystery
threatening their domestic peace.  I could but fail; a few
inquiries would assure me of the folly or the wisdom of my course.

Having reached this point and satisfied myself as to my real duty,
I rose to leave my room for another word or two with Ellen.  As I
did so my eyes fell on the shade still drawn between me and the
next house.  The impulse to raise it was irresistible.  I must see
if either of the two old faces still occupied that gable window.
It was not likely.  It was not in ordinary human nature to keep up
so unremitting a watch.  Yet as the shade flew up at my touch I
realized that my astonishment would have been great and my
expectations altogether disappointed if I had not encountered the
fixed countenance and the set stare with which I had come to
connect this solitary window.  Miss Charity was there, and, though
I now knew what underlay her senile, if not utterly mad watch, the
impression made upon me by her hopeless countenance was as keen as
it had ever been, and lent point and impetus to the task I had just
set for myself.

It was apparent that Mrs. Packard had forgotten or changed her mind
about joining me in her own room, but nevertheless I went out, to
discover what possible duties she might have laid out for me.
Ascertaining from Ellen that Mrs. Packard had engagements which
would take her out at noon, I waited for that hour to pass, then
excused myself and went out also.

The owner of the house whose shaded history I was now determined to
learn was John Searles, a real estate agent.  To his office in Main
Street I at once proceeded, not without doubts and much inward
trepidation, but buoyed up by the assurance of Mayor Packard's
approval of any attempt, however far-fetched or unpromising, which
held out the least possibility of relieving Mrs. Packard from her
superstitious fears and restoring the peace and happiness of the
household.  If only Mr. Searles should prove to be an approachable
man!

I had never seen him or heard him spoken of, or I should not have
encouraged myself with this hope.  At my first glimpse of his tall,
gaunt figure, hard features, and brisk impatient movements, I knew
that my wit and equanimity would be put to their full test in the
interview.

He was engaged, at my entrance, in some harsh dispute with a couple
of other men, but came forward quickly enough when he saw me.
Recognizing at once that any attempt at ingratiation would fail
with this man, I entered at once upon my errand by asking a
question direct enough to command his attention, if it did not
insure the desired reply.

"Mr. Searles, when you purchased the house on Franklin Street, did
you know enough about it to have an answer ready for any one who
might declare it haunted?"

The abruptness of the attack produced its effect.  Annoyance swept
every hint of patience from face and manner, and he exclaimed in a
tone which conveyed, only too openly, how disagreeable the subject
was to him.

"Again!"

I smiled.  It would not do to show how much I felt the total lack
of sympathy in his manner.

"You will have trouble," said I, "until it is proved that the
occurrences which have provoked this report have a very natural and
quite human source."

He stopped in his nervous fidgeting and gave me a quick hard look.

"Who are you?" he asked, "and why has Mrs. Packard made you her
messenger instead of coming herself?"

"I am her companion, engaged by Mayor Packard to stay with her
during his contemplated absence.  I am here instead of Mrs. Packard
because it is she herself who is the present sufferer from the
disagreeable experiences which attend life in the Franklin Street
house."

"Mrs. Packard?"  His tone betrayed a complete incredulity.  "Mrs.
Packard?  a woman of such strong good sense!  I think you must have
been misled by some foolish attempt at humor on her part.  Does she
know that you have come to me with this complaint?"

"She does not.  She is not in a condition to be consulted on the
subject.  I am Mayor Packard's emissary.  He is very anxious about
his wife."  Then as Mr. Searles continued unmoved, I added in a
straightforward manner, and with all the earnestness I felt: "Mrs.
Packard believes herself to have come face to face with an
undoubted specter in the library of the house they have rented from
you.  She related the circumstances to her husband and to myself
this very morning.  It occurred, according to her story, several
days ago; meantime her manner and appearance have shown a great
change.  Mayor Packard is not the only one who has noticed it.  The
whole household has been struck by her condition, though no one
knew its cause until to-day.  Of course, we do not believe in the
specter; that was pure hallucination on her part.  This we no more
doubt than you do."

"Then what do you want here?" he asked, after a moment of harsh
scrutiny.

"Proof which will convince her that it was an hallucination and
without the least basis in any spiritual fact," I returned.  "If
you will give me a few minutes of your time, I will explain just
what I mean and also make known to you my wishes.  I can wait till
you have finished your business with the gentlemen I see over
there."

He honored me with a look, which for the first time showed any
appreciation of my feelings, and pushing open a door near by,
called out to some one within:

"Here, Robinson, talk with this lady.  Her business is not in my
line."  Then, turning to me with a quick, "Step in, Madam," he left
me with the greatest abruptness and hurried back to the gentlemen
awaiting him on the other side of the room.

I was considerably taken aback by this move, but knew no other
course than to enter the room he had pointed out and pursue my
conversation with whomever I should find there.

Alas! the gentleman who rose at my entrance was also one of the
tall, thin and nervous type.  But he was not without heart, like
the other, as was soon made apparent to me.  Very few human faces
are plainer than the one I now searched for the encouragement of
which I stood in such sore need, but also very few faces, handsome
or otherwise, have the attraction of so pleasant a smile.  Its
affable greeting was followed by the hasty pushing forward of a
chair and a kind inquiry as to what he could do for me.

My answer woke an immediate interest.  "My name is Saunders," I
said.  "I am at present an inmate of Mayor Packard's house--a house
belonging to Mr. Searles, and one which has its drawbacks."

The meaning look with which I uttered the last sentence called
forth an answering one.  A flash of excitement broke over his
features and he cast a quick glance at the door which fortunately
had swung to at my entrance.

"Has--have they--has anything of a disagreeable nature happened to
any one in this house?" he asked with ill-concealed perturbation.
"I did not expect it during their tenantry, but if such has
occurred, I am obliged to Mrs. Packard for letting me know.  She
promised to, you see, and--"

"She promised!" I cried.

"Yes; in joke no doubt, being at the time in a very incredulous
state of mind.  She vowed that she would let me know the very day
she saw the lights or encountered anything in the house, which
could be construed into a spiritual visitation.  Has such a
manifestation occurred?" he eagerly inquired.  "Has it? has it?  Am
I to add her name to the list of those who have found the house
uninhabitable?"

"That I am not ready to say," was my cautious response.  "Mrs.
Packard, during the period of her husband's candidacy, would
scarcely wish to draw public attention to herself or these
supernatural happenings by any such move.  I hope that what I say
to you on this subject will go no further."

"You may rest assured that it will never become public property,"
he assured me.  "One person I am bound to tell; but that is all.
That person is too much interested in the house's good name to
spread so damaging a story.  An experience, more or less
disagreeable, must have occurred to some member of the family,"
continued Mr. Robinson.  "Your presence here assures me of that.
What kind of experience?  The--manifestations have not always been
of the same nature."

"No; and that is what so engages my attention.  These experiences
differ so much in their character.  Do you happen to know the exact
nature of each?  I have a theory which I long to substantiate.  May
I trust you with it?"

"You certainly may, Miss.  No one has thought over this matter more
earnestly than I have.  Not because of any superstitious tendency
on my part; rather from the lack of it.  I don't believe in
spirits.  I don't believe in supernatural agencies of any kind; yet
strange things do happen in that house, things which we find it
hard to explain."

"Mrs. Packard's experience was this.  She believes herself to have
encountered in the library the specter of a man; a specter with a
gaze so terrifying that it impressed itself upon her as an omen of
death, or some other dire disaster.  What have your other tenants
seen?"

"Shadows mostly; but not always.  Sometimes the outline of an arm
projecting out of darkness; sometimes, the trace of steps on the
hall floors, or the discovery in the morning of an open door which
had been carefully closed at bedtime.  Once it was the trailing of
ghostly fingers across the sleeper's face, and once a succession of
groans rising from the lower halls and drawing the whole family
from their beds, to find no one but themselves within the whole
four walls.  A clearly outlined phantom has been scarce.  But Mrs.
Packard has seen one, you say."

"Thinks she has seen one," I corrected.  "Mayor Packard and myself
both look upon the occurrence as a wholly imaginary one, caused by
her secret brooding over the very manifestations you mention.  If
she could be convinced that these manifestations had a physical
origin, she would immediately question the reality of the specter
she now believes herself to have seen.  To bring her to this point
I am ready to exert myself to the utmost.  Are you willing to do
the same?  If so, I can assure you of Mayor Packard's
appreciation."

"How?  What?  You believe the whole thing a fraud?  That all these
tenants coming from various quarters manufactured all these stories
and submitted to endless inconvenience to perpetuate a senseless
lie?"

"No, I don't think that.  The tenants were honest enough, but who
owned the house before Mr. Searles?" I was resolved to give no hint
of the information imparted to me by Mrs. Packard.

"The Misses Quinlan, the two maiden ladies who live next door to
Mayor Packard."

"I don't know them," said I truthfully.

"Very worthy women," Mr. Robinson assured me.  "They are as much
disturbed and as completely puzzled as the rest of us over the
mysterious visitations which have lessened the value of their
former property.  They have asked me more than once for an
explanation of its marked unpopularity.  I felt foolish to say
ghosts, but finally I found myself forced to do so, much to my
lasting regret."

"How?  Why?" I asked, with all the force of a very rapidly
increasing curiosity.

"Because its effect upon them has been so disastrous.  They were
women of intelligence previous to this, one of them quite markedly
so, but from that day they have given evidence of mental weakness
which can only be attributed to their continual brooding over this
mysterious topic.  The house, whose peculiarities we are now
discussing, was once their family homestead, and they shrink from
the reproach of its unfortunate reputation.  What!  you don't think
so?" he impetuously asked, moved, perhaps, by my suggestive
silence.  "You are suspicious of these two poor old women?  What
reason have you for that, Miss Saunders?  What motive could they
have for depreciating the value of what was once their own
property?"

So he knew nothing of the lost bonds!  Mrs. Packard had made no
mistake when she assured me of the secrecy with which they had
endured their misfortune.  It gave me great relief; I could work
more safely with this secret unshared.  But the situation called
for dissimulation.  It was with anything but real openness that I
declared:

"You can not calculate the impulses of an affected mind.  Jealousy
of the past may influence these unfortunate women.  They possibly
hate to see strangers in the rooms made sacred by old
associations."

"That is possible, but how could they, shut up in a house,
separated from yours by a distance of several feet, be held
accountable for the phenomena observed in 393?  There are no means
of communication between the two buildings; even the doors, which
once faced each other across the dividing alley, have been closed
up.  Interference from them is impossible."

"No more impossible than from any other outside source.  Is it a
fact that the doors and windows of this strangely haunted house
were always found securely locked after each occurrence of the
phenomena you have mentioned?"

"So I have been told by every tenant I have questioned, and I was
careful to question them, I assure you."

"That settles the matter in my mind," I asserted.  "These women
know of some means of entrance that has escaped general discovery.
Cunning is a common attribute of the unsettled brain."

"And they are very cunning.  Miss Saunders, you have put a totally
new idea into my head.  I do not place much stress upon the motive
you have attributed to them, nor do I see how the appearances noted
could have been produced by these two antiquated women; but the
interest they have displayed in the effect these have had upon
others has been of the most decided nature.  They have called here
after the departure of every fresh tenant, and it was all that I
could do to answer their persistent inquiries.  It is to them and
not to Mr. Searles I feel bound to report the apparition seen by
Mrs. Packard."

"To them!" I ejaculated in amazement.  "Why to them?  They no
longer have a proprietary interest in the house."

"Very true, but they long ago exacted a promise from me to keep a
strict account of such complaints as were raised against the house.
They, in short, paid me to do so.  From time to time they have come
here to read this account.  It annoys Mr. Searles, but I have had
considerable patience with them for reasons which your kind heart
will instantly suggest."

I thought of the real pathos of the situation, and how much I might
increase his interest by giving him the full details of their
pitiful history, and the maddening hopes it engendered of a
possible discovery of the treasure they still believed to be hidden
in the house.  What I said, however, was this:

"You have kept an account, you say, of the varied phenomena seen in
this house?  You have that account now?"

"Yes, Miss Saunders."

"Let us look it over together.  Let us see if it does not give us
some clue to the mystery puzzling us."

He eyed me doubtfully, or as much so as his great nature would
allow.  Meantime, I gauged my man.  Was he to be thoroughly and
unequivocally trusted?  His very hesitation in face of his
undoubted sympathy with me seemed to insure that he was.  At all
events, the occasion warranted some risk on my part.  At least I
persuaded myself that it did; so without waiting for his reply, I
earnestly remarked:

"The matter is more serious than you suppose.  If the mayor were
not unavoidably called away by his political obligations, he would
add his entreaties to mine for a complete sifting of this whole
affair.  The Misses Quinlan may very well be innocent of inciting
these manifestations; if so, we can do them no harm by a little
confidential consideration of the affair from the standpoint I have
given you.  If they are not, then Mr. Searles and Mayor Packard
should know it."

It appeared to convince him.  His homely face shone with the fire
of sudden interest and resolve, and, reaching for a small drawer at
the right of his desk, he opened it and drew forth a folded paper
which he proceeded to open before me with the remark:

"Here is a report that I have kept for my own satisfaction.  I do
not feel that in showing it to you I am violating any trust reposed
in me by the Misses Quinlan.  I never promised secrecy in the
matter."

I glanced at the paper, all eagerness.  He smiled and pushed it
toward me.  This is what I read:


  First tenant, Mr. Hugh Dennison and family.

Night 1: Heard and saw nothing.
Night 2: The entire household wakened by a scream seemingly
 coming from below.  This was twice repeated before Mr. Dennison
 could reach the hall; the last time in far distant and smothered
 tones.  Investigation revealed nothing.  No person and no trace
 of any persons, save themselves, could be found anywhere in the
 house.  Uncomfortable feelings, but no alarm as yet.
Night 3: No screams, but a sound of groaning in the library.
 The tall clock standing near the drawing-room door stopped at
 twelve, and a door was found open which Mr. Dennison is sure he
 shut tight on retiring.  A second unavailing search.  One servant
 left the next morning.
Night 4: Footfalls on the stairs.  The library door, locked by Mr.
 Dennison's own hand, is heard to unclose.  The timepiece on the
 library mantel-shelf strikes twelve; but it is slightly fast, and
 Mr. and Mrs. Dennison, who have crept from their room to the
 stair-head, listen breathlessly for the deep boom of the great
 hall clock--the one which had stopped the night before.  No light
 is burning anywhere, and the hall below is a pit of darkness, when
 suddenly Mrs. Dennison seizes her husband's arm and, gasping out,
 "The clock, the clock!" falls fainting to the floor.  He bends to
 look and faintly, in the heart of the shadows, he catches in dim
 outline the face of the clock, and reaching up to it a spectral
 hand.  Nothing else--and in another moment that, too, disappears;
 but the silence is something awful--the great clock has stopped.
 With a shout he stumbles downward, lights up the hall, lights up
 the rooms, but finds nothing, and no one.  Next morning the second
 servant leaves, but her place is soon supplied by an applicant we
 will call Bess.
Night 5: Mrs. Dennison sleeps at a hotel with the children.  Mr.
 Dennison, revolver in hand, keeps watch on the haunted stairway.
 He has fastened up every door and shutter with his own hand, and
 with equal care extinguished all lights.  As the hour of twelve
 approaches, he listens breathlessly.  There is certainly a stir
 somewhere, but he can not locate it, not quite satisfy himself
 whether it is a footfall or a rustle that he hears.  The clock
 in the library strikes twelve, then the one in the hall gives one
 great boom, and stops.  Instantly he raises his revolver and
 shoots directly at its face.  No sound from human lips answers
 the discharge of the weapon.  In the flash which for a moment has
 lighted up the whole place, he catches one glimpse of the broken
 dial with its two hands pointing directly at twelve, but nothing
 more.  Then all is dark again, and he goes slowly back to his own
 room.
 The next day he threw up his lease.

   Second tenant: Mrs. Crispin.

 Stayed but one night.  Would never tell us what she saw.

   Third tenant: Mrs. Southwick.  Hires Bess for maid-of-all-work, the
   only girl she could get.

Night 1: Unearthly lights shining up through the house, waking
 the family.  Disappeared as one and all came creeping out into the
 hall.
Night 2: The same, followed by deep groans.  Children waked and
 shrieked.
Night 3: Nothing.
Night 4: Lights, groans and strange shadows on the walls and
 ceilings of the various hallways.  Family give notice the next day,
 but do not leave for a week, owing to sickness.  No manifestations
 while doctor and nurses are in the house.

   House stands vacant for three months.  Bess offers to remain in it
   as caretaker, but her offer is refused.

   Police investigate.

 An amusing farce.
 One of them saw something and could not be laughed out of it by his
 fellows.  But the general report was unsatisfactory.  The mistake
 was the employment of Irishmen in a task involving superstition.

   Fourth tenant: Mr. Weston and family.

 Remain three weeks.  Leaves suddenly because the nurse encountered
 something moving about in the lower hall one night when she went
 down to the kitchen to procure hot water for a sick child.  Bess
 again offered her services, but the family would not stay under any
 circumstances.

   Another long period without tenant.

 Mr. Searles tries a night in the empty house.  Sits and dozes in
 library till two.  Wakes suddenly.  Door he has tightly shut is
 standing open.  He feels the draft.  Turns on light from dark
 lantern.  Something is there--a shape--he can not otherwise
 describe it.  As he stares at it, it vanishes through doorway.  He
 rushes for it; finds nothing.  The hall is empty; so is the whole
 house.

This finished the report.

"So Mr. Searles has had his own experiences of these Mysteries!" I
exclaimed.

"As you see.  Perhaps that is why he is so touchy on the subject."

"Did he ever give you any fuller account of his experience than is
detailed here?"

"No; he won't talk about it."

"He tried to let the house, however."

"Yes, but he did not succeed for a long time.  Finally the mayor
took it."

Refolding the paper, I handed it back to Mr. Robinson.  I had its
contents well in mind.

"There is one fact to which I should like to call your attention,"
said I.  "The manifestations, as here recorded, have all taken
place in the lower part of the house.  I should have had more faith
in them, if they had occurred above stairs.  There are no outlets
through the roof."

"Nor any visible ones below.  At least no visible one was ever
found open."

"What about the woman, Bess?" I asked.  "How do you account for her
persistency in clinging to a place her employers invariably fled
from? She seems to have been always on hand with an offer of her
services."

"Bess is not a young woman, but she is a worker of uncommon
ability, very rigid and very stoical.  She herself accounts for her
willingness to work in this house by her utter disbelief in
spirits, and the fact that it is the one place in the world which
connects her with her wandering and worthless husband.  Their final
parting occurred during Mr. Dennison's tenancy, and as she had
given the wanderer the Franklin Street address, you could not
reason her out of the belief that on his return he would expect to
find here there.  That is what she explained to Mr. Searles."

"You interest me, Mr. Robinson.  Is she a plain woman?  Such a one
as a man would not be likely to return to?"

"No, she is a very good-looking woman, refined and full of
character, but odd, very odd,--in fact, baffling."

"How baffling?"

"I never knew her to look any one directly in the eye.  Her manner
is abstracted and inspires distrust.  There is also a marked
incongruity between her employment and her general appearance.  She
looks out of place in her working apron, yet she is not what you
would call a lady."

"Did her husband come back?"

"No, not to my knowledge."

"And where is she now?"

"Very near you, Miss Saunders, when you are at your home in
Franklin Street.  Not being able to obtain a situation in the house
itself, she has rented the little shop opposite, where you can find
her any day selling needles and thread."

"I have noticed that shop," I admitted, not knowing whether to give
more or less weight to my suspicions in thus finding the mayor's
house under the continued gaze of another watchful eye.

"You will find two women there," the amiable Mr. Robinson hastened
to explain.  "The one with a dark red spot just under her hair is
Bess.  But perhaps she doesn't interest you.  She always has me.
If it had not been for one fact, I should have suspected her of
having been in some way connected with the strange doings we have
just been considering.  She was not a member of the household
during the occupancy of Mrs. Crispin and the Westons, yet these
unusual manifestations went on just the same."

"Yes, I noted that."

"So her connivance is eliminated."

"Undoubtedly.  I am still disposed to credit the Misses Quinlan
with the whole ridiculous business.  They could not bear to see
strangers in the house they had once called their own, and took the
only means suggested to their crazy old minds to rid the place of
them."

Mr. Robinson shook his head, evidently unconvinced.  The temptation
was great to strengthen my side of the argument by a revelation of
their real motive. Once acquainted with the story of the missing
bonds he could not fail to see the extreme probability that the two
sisters, afflicted as they were with dementia, should wish to
protect the wealth which was once so near their grasp, from the
possibility of discovery by a stranger.  But I dared not take him
quite yet into my full confidence.  Indeed, the situation did not
demand it.  I had learned from him what I was most anxious to know,
and was now in a position to forward my own projects without
further aid from him.  Almost as if he had read my thoughts, Mr.
Robinson now hastened to remark:

"I find it difficult to credit these poor old souls with any such
elaborate plan to empty the house, even had they possessed the most
direct means of doing so, for no better reason than this one you
state.  Had money been somehow involved, or had they even thought
so, it would be different.  They are a little touched in the head
on the subject of money; which isn't very strange considering their
present straits.  They even show an interest in other people's
money.  They have asked me more than once if any of their former
neighbors have seemed to grow more prosperous since leaving
Franklin Street."

"I see; touched, touched!" I laughed, rising in my anxiety to hide
any show of feeling at the directness of this purely accidental
attack.  But the item struck me as an important one. Mr. Robinson
gave me a keen look as I uttered the usual commonplaces and
prepared to take my leave.

"May I ask your intentions in this matter?" said he.

"I wish I knew them myself," was my perfectly candid answer.  "It
strikes me now that my first step should be to ascertain whether
there exists any secret connection between the two houses which
would enable the Misses Quinlan or their emissaries to gain access
to their old home, without ready detection.  I know of none, and--"

"There is none," broke in its now emphatic agent.  "A half-dozen
tenants, to say nothing of Mr. Searles himself, have looked it
carefully over.  All the walls are intact; there is absolutely no
opening anywhere for surreptitious access."

"Possibly not.  You certainly discourage me very much.  I had hoped
much from my theory.  But we are not done with the matter.  Mrs.
Packard's mind must be cleared of its fancies, if it is in my power
to do it.  You will hear from me again, Mr. Robinson.  Meanwhile,
I may be sure of your good will?"

"Certainly, certainly, and of my cooperation also, if you want it."

"Thank you," said I, and left the office.

His last look was one of interest not untinged by compassion.




CHAPTER XI

BESS


On my way back I took the opposite side of the street from that I
usually approached.  When I reached the little shop I paused.
First glancing at the various petty articles exposed in the window,
I quietly stepped in.  A contracted and very low room met my eyes,
faintly lighted by a row of panes in the upper half of the door and
not at all by the window, which was hung on the inside with a heavy
curtain.  Against two sides of this room were arranged shelves
filled with boxes labeled in the usual way to indicate their
contents.  These did not strike me as being very varied or of a
very high order.  There was no counter in front, only some tables
on which lay strewn fancy boxes of thread and other useless knick-
knacks to which certain shopkeepers appear to cling though they can
seldom find customers for them.  A woman stood at one of these
tables untangling a skein of red yarn.  Behind her I saw another
leaning in an abstracted way over a counter which ran from wall to
wall across the extreme end of the shop.  This I took to be Bess.
She had made no move at my entrance and she made no move now.  The
woman with the skein appeared, on the contrary, as eager to see as
the other seemed indifferent.  I had to buy something and I did so
in as matter-of-fact a way as possible, considering that my
attention was more given to the woman in the rear than to the
articles I was purchasing.

"You have a very convenient place here," I casually remarked, as I
handed out my money.  With this I turned squarely about and looked
directly at her whom I believed to be Bess.

A voluble answer from the woman at my side, but not the wink of an
eye from the one whose attention I had endeavored to attract.

"I live in the house opposite," I carelessly went on, taking in
every detail of the strange being I was secretly addressing.

"Oh!" she exclaimed in startled tones, roused into speech at last.
"You live opposite; in Mayor Packard's house?"

I approached her, smiling.  She had dropped her hands from her chin
and seemed very eager now, more eager than the other woman, to
interest me in what she had about her and so hold me to the shop.

"Look at this," she cried, holding up an article of such cheap
workmanship that I wondered so sensible an appearing woman would
cumber her shelves with it.  "I am glad you live over there," for
I had nodded to her question.  "I'm greatly interested in that
house.  I've worked there as cook and waitress several times."

I met her look; it was sharp and very intelligent.

"Then you know its reputation," I laughingly suggested.

She made a contemptuous gesture.  The woman was really very
good-looking, but baffling in her manner, as Mr. Robinson had said,
and very hard to classify.  "That isn't what interests me," she
protested.  "I've other reasons.  You're not a relative of the
family, are you?" she asked impetuously, leaning over the table to
get a nearer view of my face.

"No, nor even a friend.  I am in their employ just now as a
companion to Mrs. Packard.  Her health is not very good, and the
mayor is away a great deal."

"I thought you didn't belong there.  I know all who belong there.
I've little else to do but stare across the street," she added
apologetically and with a deep flush.  "Business is very poor in
this shop."

I was standing directly in front of her.  Turning quickly about, I
looked through the narrow panes of the door, and found that my eyes
naturally rested on the stoop of the opposite house.  Indeed, this
stoop was about all that could be seen from the spot where this
woman stood.

"Another eve bent in constant watchfulness upon us," I inwardly
commented.  "We are quite surrounded.  The house should certainly
hold treasure to warrant all this interest.  But what could this
one-time domestic know of the missing bonds?"

"An old-fashioned doorway," I remarked.  "It is the only one of the
kind on the whole street.  It makes the house conspicuous, but in
a way I like.  I don't wonder you enjoy looking at it.  To me such
a house and such a doorway suggest mystery and a romantic past.
If the place is not haunted--and only a fool believes in ghosts
--something strange must have happened there or I should never have
the nervous feeling I have in going about the halls and up and down
the stairways.  Did you never have that feeling?"

"Never.  I'm not given to feelings.  I live one day after another
and just wait."

Not given to feelings!  With such eyes in such a face!  You should
have looked down when you said that, Bess; I might have believed
you then.

"Wait?" I softly repeated.  "Wait for what?  For fortune to enter
your little shop-door?"

"No, for my husband to come back," was her unexpected answer,
uttered grimly enough to have frightened that husband away again,
had he been fortunate or unfortunate enough to hear her.  "I'm a
married woman, Miss, and shouldn't be working like this.  And I
won't be always; my man'll come back and make a lady of me again.
It's that I'm waiting for."

Here a customer came in.  Naturally I drew back, for our faces were
nearly touching.

"Don't go," she pleaded, catching me by the sleeve and turning
astonishingly pale for one ordinarily so ruddy.  "I want to ask a
favor of you.  Come into my little room behind.  You won't regret
it."  This last in an emphatic whisper.

Amazed at the turn which the conversation had taken and
congratulating myself greatly upon my success in insuring her
immediate confidence, I slipped through the opening she made for me
between the tables serving for a counter and followed her into a
room at the rear, which from its appearance answered the triple
purpose of sleeping-room, parlor and kitchen.

"Pardon my impertinence," said she, as she carefully closed the
door behind us.  "It's not my habit to make friends with strangers,
but I've taken a fancy to you and think you can be trusted.  Will--"
she hesitated, then burst out, "will you do something for me?"

"If I can," I smiled.

"How long do you expect to stay over there?"

"Oh, that I can't say."

"A month? a week?"

"Probably a week."

"Then you can do what I want.  Miss--"

"Saunders," I put in.

"There is something in that house which belongs to me."

I started; this was hardly what I expected her to say.

"Something of great importance to me; something which I must have
and have very soon.  I don't want to go there for it myself.  I hid
it in a very safe place one day when my future looked doubtful, and
I didn't know where I might be going or what might happen to me.
Mrs. Packard would think it strange if she saw where, and might
make it very uncomfortable for me.  But you can get what I want
without trouble if you are not afraid of going about the house at
night.  It's a little box with my name on it; and it is hidden--"

"Where?"

"Behind a brick I loosened in the cellar wall.  I can describe the
very place.  Oh, you think I am asking too much of you--a stranger
and a lady."

"No, I'm willing to do what I can for you.  But I think you ought
to tell me what's in the box, so that I shall know exactly what I
am doing."

"I can't tell; I do not dare to tell till I have it again in my own
hand.  Then we will look it over together.  Do you hesitate?  You
needn't; no inconvenience will follow to any one, if you are
careful to rely on yourself and not let any other person see or
handle this box."

"How large is it?" I asked, quite as breathless as herself, as I
realized the possibilities underlying this remarkable request.

"It is so small that you can conceal it under an apron or in the
pocket of your coat.  In exchange for it, I will give you all I can
afford--ten dollars."

"No more than that?" I asked, testing her.

"No more at first.  Afterward--if it brings me what it ought to, I
will give you whatever you think it is worth.  Does that satisfy
you?  Are you willing to risk an encounter with the ghost, for just
ten dollars and a promise?"

The smile with which she said this was indescribable.  I think it
gave me a more thrilling consciousness of human terror in face of
the supernatural than anything which I had yet heard in this
connection.  Surely her motive for remaining in the haunted house
had been extraordinarily strong.

"You are afraid," she declared.  "You will shrink, when the time
comes, from going into that cellar at night."

I shook my head; I had already regained both my will-power and the
resolution to carry out this adventure to the end.

"I will go," said I.

"And get me my box?"

"Yes!"

"And bring it to me here as early the next day as you can leave
Mrs. Packard?"

"Yes."

"Oh, you don't know what this means to me."

I had a suspicion, but held my peace and let her rhapsodize.

"No one in all my life has ever shown me so much kindness!  Are you
sure you won't be tempted to tell any one what you mean to do?"

"Quite sure."

"And will go down into the cellar and get this box for me, all by
yourself?"

"Yes, if you demand it."

"I do; you will see why some day."

"Very well, you can trust me.  Now tell me where I am to find the
brick you designate."

"It's in the cellar wall, about half-way down on the right-hand
side.  You will see nothing but stone for a foot or two above the
floor, but after that comes the brick wall.  On one of these
bricks you will detect a cross scratched.  That's the one.  It will
look as well cemented as the rest, but if you throw water against
it, you will find that in a little while you will be able to pry it
out.  Take something to do this with, a knife or a pair of
scissors.  When the brick falls out, feel behind with your hand and
you will find the box."

"A questionable task.  What if I should be seen at it?"

"The ghost will protect you!"

Again that smile of mingled sarcasm and innuendo.  It was no common
servant girl's smile, any more than her language was that of the
ignorant domestic.

"I believe the ghost fails to walk since the present tenants came
into the house," I remarked.

"But its reputation remains; you'll not be disturbed."

"Possibly not; a good reason why you might safely undertake the
business yourself.  I can find some way of letting you in."

"No, no.  I shall never again cross that threshold!"  Her whole
attitude showed revolt and bitter determination.

"Yet you have never been frightened by anything there?"

"I know; but I have suffered; that is, for one who has no feelings.
The box will have to remain in its place undisturbed if you won't
get it for me."

"Positively?"

"Yes, Miss; nothing would induce me even to cross the street.  But
I want the box."

"You shall have it," said I.




CHAPTER XII

SEARCHINGS


I seemed bound to be the prey of a divided duty.  As I crossed the
street, I asked myself which of the two experiments I had in mind
should occupy my attention first.  Should I proceed at once with
that close study and detailed examination of the house, which I
contemplated in my eagerness to establish my theory of a secret
passage between it and the one now inhabited by the Misses Quinlan,
or should I wait to do this until I had recovered the box, which
might hold still greater secrets?

I could not decide, so I resolved to be guided by circumstances.
If Mrs. Packard were still out, I did not think I could sit down
till I had a complete plan of the house as a start in the inquiry
which interested me most.

Mrs. Packard was still out,--so much Nixon deigned to tell me in
answer to my question.  Whether the fact displeased him or not I
could not say, but he was looking very sour and seemed to resent
the trouble he had been to in opening the door for me.  Should I
notice this, even by an attempt to conciliate him?  I decided not.
A natural manner was best; he was too keen not to notice and give
his own interpretation to uncalled for smiles or words which
contrasted too strongly with his own marked reticence. I therefore
said nothing as he pottered slowly back into his own quarters in
the rear, but lingered about down-stairs till I was quite sure he
was out of sight and hearing.  Then I came back and took up my
point of view on the spot where the big hall clock had stood in the
days of Mr. Dennison.  Later, I made a drawing of this floor as it
must have looked at that time.  You will find it on the opposite
page.


[transcriber's note: The plan shows the house to have two rows of
rooms with a hall between. In the front each room ends in a bow
window.  On the right the drawing-room has two doors opening into
the hall, equally spaced near the front and rear of the room.
Across the hall are two rooms of apparently equal size; a reception
room in front and the library behind it, both rooms having windows
facing on the alley.  There is a stairway in the hall just behind
the door to the reception room.  The study is behind the drawing-
room. Opposite this is a side hall and the dining-room.  The
library and dining-room both open off this hall with the dining
room also having doors to the main hall and kitchen.  The side hall
ends with a stoop in the alley.  A small room labeled kitchen, etc.
lies behind the dining-room and the hall extends beyond the study
beside the kitchen with the cellar stairs on the kitchen side.
There is a small rectangle in the hall about two-thirds of the way
down the side of the drawing-room which is labeled A.]


Near the place where I stood (marked A on the plan), had occurred
most of the phenomena, which could be located at all.  Here the
spectral hand had been seen stopping the clock.  Here the shape
had passed encountered by Mr. Weston's cook, and just a few steps
beyond where the library door opened under the stairs Mr. Searles
had seen the flitting figure which had shut his mouth on the
subject of his tenants' universal folly.  From the front then
toward the back these manifestations had invariably peeped to
disappear--where?  That was what I was to determine; what I am
sure Mayor Packard would wish me to determine if he knew the whole
situation as I knew it from his wife's story and the record I had
just read at the agent's office.

Alas! there were many points of exit from this portion of the hall.
The drawing-room opened near; so did Mayor Packard's study; then
there was the kitchen with its various offices, ending as I knew in
the cellar stairs.  Nearer I could see the door leading into the
dining-room and, opening closer yet, the short side hall running
down to what had once been the shallow vestibule of a small side
entrance, but which, as I had noted many times in passing to and
from the dining-room, was now used as a recess or alcove to hold a
cabinet of Indian curios.  In which of these directions should I
carry my inquiry?  All looked equally unpromising, unless it was
Mayor Packard's study, and that no one with the exception of Mr.
Steele ever entered save by his invitation, not even his wife.  I
could not hope to cross that threshold, nor did I greatly desire to
invade the kitchen, especially while Nixon was there.  Should I
have to wait till the mayor's return for the cooperation my task
certainly demanded?  It looked that way.  But before yielding to
the discouragement following this thought, I glanced about me again
and suddenly remembered, first the creaking board, which had once
answered to the so-called spirit's flight, and secondly the fact
which common sense should have suggested before, that if my theory
were true and the secret presence, whose coming and going I had
been considering, had fled by some secret passage leading to the
neighboring house, then by all laws of convenience and natural
propriety that passage should open from the side facing the Quinlan
domicile, and not from that holding Mayor Packard's study and the
remote drawing-room.

This considerably narrowed my field of inquiry, and made me
immediately anxious to find that creaking board which promised to
narrow it further yet.

Where should I seek it?  In these rear halls, of course, but I
hated to be caught pacing them at this hour.  Nixon's step had not
roused it or I should have noticed it, for I was, in a way,
listening for this very sound.  It was not in the direct path then
from the front door to the kitchen.  Was it on one side or in the
space about the dining-room door or where the transverse corridor
met the main hall?  All these floors were covered in the old-
fashioned way with carpet, which would seem to show that no new
boards had been laid and that the creaking one should still be
here.

I ventured to go as far as the transverse hall,--I was at full
liberty to enter the library.  But no result followed this
experiment; my footsteps had never fallen more noiselessly.  Where
could the board be?  In aimless uncertainty I stepped into the
corridor and instantly a creak woke under my foot.  I had located
the direction in which one of the so-called phantoms had fled.  It
was down this transverse hall.

Flushed with apparent success, I looked up at the walls on either
side of me.  They were gray with paint and presented one unbroken
surface from base-board to ceiling, save where the two doorways
opened, one into the library, the other into the dining-room.  Had
the flying presence escaped by either of these two rooms?  I knew
the dining-room well.  I had had several opportunities for studying
its details.  I thought I knew the library; besides, Mr. Searles
had been in the library when the shape advanced upon him from the
hall,--a fact eliminating that room as a possible source of
approach!  What then was left?  The recess which had once served as
an old-time entrance.  Ah, that gave promise of something.  It
projected directly toward where the adjacent walls had once held
two doors, between which any sort of mischief might take place.
Say that the Misses Quinlan had retained certain keys.  What easier
than for one of them to enter the outer door, strike a light, open
the inner one and flash this light up through the house till steps
or voices warned her of an aroused family, when she had only to
reclose the inside door, put out the light and escape by the outer
one.

But alas! at this point I remembered that this, as well as all
other outside doors, had invariably been protected by bolt, and
that these bolts had never been found disturbed.  Veritably I was
busying myself for nothing over this old vestibule.  Yet before I
left it I gave it another glance; satisfied myself that its walls
were solid; in fact, built of brick like the house.  This on two
sides; the door occupied the third and showed the same unbroken
coat of thick, old paint, its surface barely hidden by the cabinet
placed at right angles to it.  Enough of it, however, remained
exposed to view to give me an opportunity of admiring its sturdy
panels and its old-fashioned lock.  The door was further secured by
heavy pivoted bars extending from jamb to jamb.  An egg-and-dart
molding extended all around the casing, where the inner door had
once hung.  All solid, all very old-fashioned, but totally
unsuggestive of any reasonable solution of the mystery I had
vaguely hoped it to explain.  Was I mistaken in my theory, and must
I look elsewhere for what I still honestly expected to find?
Undoubtedly; and with this decision I turned to leave the recess,
when a sensation, of too peculiar a nature for me readily to
understand it, caused me to stop short, and look down at my feet in
an inquiring way and afterward to lift the rug on which I had been
standing and take a look at the floor underneath.  It was covered
with carpet, like the rest of the hall, but this did not disguise
the fact that it sloped a trifle toward the outside wall.  Had not
the idea been preposterous, I should have said that the weight of
the cabinet had been too much for it, causing it to sag quite
perceptibly at the base-board.  But this seemed too improbable to
consider.  Old as the house was, it was not old enough for its
beams to have rolled.  Yet the floor was certainly uneven, and,
what was stranger yet, had, in sagging, failed to carry the base-
board with it.  This I could see by peering around the side of the
cabinet.  Was it an important enough fact to call for explanation?
Possibly not; yet when I had taken a short leap up and come down on
what was certainly an unstable floor, I decided that I should never
be satisfied till I had seen that cabinet removed and the floor
under it rigidly examined.

Yet when I came to take a look at this projection from the library
window and saw that this floor, like that of the many entrances,
was only the height of one step from the ground, I felt the folly
into which my inquiring spirit had led me, and would have dismissed
the whole subject from my mind if my eyes had not detected at that
moment on one of the tables an unusually thin paper-knife.  This
gave me an idea.  Carrying it back with me into the recess, I got
down on my knees, and first taking the precaution to toss a little
stick-pin of mine under the cabinet to be reached after in case I
was detected there by Nixon, I insinuated the cutter between the
base-board and the floor and found that I could not only push it in
an inch or more before striking the brick, but run it quite freely
around from one corner of the recess to the other.  This was surely
surprising.  The exterior of this vestibule must be considerably
larger than the interior would denote.  What occupied the space
between?  I went upstairs full of thought.  Sometime, and that
before long, I would have that cabinet removed.




CHAPTER XIII

A DISCOVERY


Mrs. Packard came in very soon after this.  She was accompanied by
two friends and I could hear them talking and laughing in her room
upstairs all the afternoon.  It gave me leisure, but leisure was
not what I stood in need of, just now.  I desired much more an
opportunity to pursue my inquiries, for I knew why she had brought
these friends home with her and lent herself to a merriment that
was not natural to her.  She wished to forestall thought; to keep
down dread; to fill the house so full of cheer that no whisper
should reach her from that spirit-world she had come to fear.  She
had seen--or believed that she had seen--a specter, and she had
certainly heard a laugh that had come from no explicable human
source.

The brightness of the sunshiny day aided her unconsciously in this
endeavor.  But I foresaw the moment when this brightness would
disappear and her friends say good-by.  Then the shadows must fall
again more heavily than ever, because of their transient lifting.
I almost wished she had indeed gone with her husband, and found
myself wondering why he had not asked her to do so when he found
what it was that depressed her.  Perhaps he had, and it was she who
had held back.  She may have made up her mind to conquer this
weakness, and to conquer it where it had originated and necessarily
held the strongest sway.  At all events, he was gone and she was
here, and I had done nothing as yet to relieve that insidious dread
with which she must anticipate a night in this house without his
presence.

I wondered if it would be any relief to her to have Mr. Steele
remain upon the premises.  I had heard him come in about three
o'clock and go into the study, and when the time came for her
friends to take their leave, and their voices in merry chatter came
up to my ear from the open boudoir door, I stole down to ask her if
I could suggest it to him.  But I was too late.  Just as I reached
the head of the stairs on the second floor he came out of the study
below and passed, hat in hand, toward the front door.

"What a handsome man!" came in an audible whisper from one of the
ladies, who now stood in the lower hall.

"Who is he?" asked the other.

I thought he held the door open one minute longer than was
necessary to catch her reply.  It was a very cold and
unenthusiastic one.

"That is Mr. Packard's secretary," said she.  "He will join the
mayor just as soon as he has finished certain preparations
intrusted to him."

"Oh!" was their quiet rejoinder, but a note of disappointment rang
in both voices as the door shut behind him.

"One does not often see a perfectly handsome man."

I stepped down to meet her when she in turn had shut the door upon
them.

But I stopped half-way.  She was standing with her head turned away
from me and the knob still in her hand.  I saw that she was
thinking or was the prey of some rapidly growing resolve.

Suddenly she seized the key and turned it.

"The house is closed for the night," she announced as she looked up
and met my astonished gaze.  "No one goes out or comes in here
again till morning.  I have seen all the visitors I have strength
for."

And though she did not know I saw it, she withdrew the key and
slipped it into her pocket.  "This is Nixon's night out," she
murmured, as she led the way to the library.  "Ellen will wait on
us and we'll have the baby down and play games and be as merry as
ever we can be,--to keep the ghosts away," she cried in fresh,
defiant tones that had just the faintest suggestion of hysteria in
them.  "We shall succeed; I don't mean to think of it again.  I'm
right in that, am I not?  You look as if you thought so.  Ah, Mr.
Packard was kind to secure me such a companion.  I must prove my
gratitude to him by keeping you close to me.  It was a mistake to
have those light-headed women visit me to-day.  They tired more
than they comforted me."

I smiled, and put the question which concerned me most nearly.

"Does Nixon stay late when he goes out?"

She threw herself into a chair and took up her embroidery.

"He will to-night," was her answer.  "A little grandniece of his is
coming on a late train from Pittsburgh.  I don't think the train is
due till midnight, and after that he's got to take her to his
daughter's on Carey Street.  It will be one o'clock at least before
he can be back."

I hid my satisfaction.  Fate was truly auspicious.  I would make
good use of his absence.  There was nobody else in the house whose
surveillance I feared.

"Pray send for the baby now," I exclaimed.  "I am eager to begin
our merry evening."

She smiled and rang the bell for Letty, the nurse.

Late that night I left my room and stole softly down-stairs.  Mrs.
Packard had ordered a bed made up for herself in the nursery and
had retired early.  So had Ellen and Letty.  The house was
therefore clear below stairs, and after I had passed the second
story I felt myself removed from all human presence as though I
were all alone in the house.

This was a relief to me, yet the experience was not a happy one.
Ellen had asked permission to leave the light burning in the hall
during the mayor's absence, so the way was plain enough before me;
but no parlor floor looks inviting after twelve o'clock at night,
and this one held a secret as yet unsolved, which did not add to
its comfort or take the mysterious threat from the shadows lurking
in corners and under stairways which I had to pass.  As I hurried
past the place where the clock had once stood, I thought of the
nurses' story and of the many frightened hearts which had throbbed
on the stairway I had just left and between the walls I was fast
approaching; but I did not turn back.  That would have been an
acknowledgment of the truth of what I was at this very time
exerting my full faculties to disprove.

I knew little about the rear of the house and nothing about the
cellar.  But when I had found my way into the kitchen and lit the
candle I had brought from my room, I had no difficulty in deciding
which of the many doors led below.  There is something about a
cellar door which is unmistakable, but it took me a minute to
summon up courage to open it after I had laid my hand on its
old-fashioned latch.  Why do we so hate darkness and the chill of
unknown regions, even when we know they are empty of all that can
hurt or really frighten us?  I was as safe there as in my bed
up-stairs, yet I had to force myself to consider more than once the
importance of my errand and the positive result it might have in
allaying the disturbance in more than one mind, before I could lift
that latch and set my foot on the short flight which led into the
yawning blackness beneath me.

But once on my way I took courage.  I pictured to myself the
collection of useful articles with which the spaces before me were
naturally filled, and thought how harmless were the sources of the
grotesque shadows which bowed to me from every side and even from
the cement floor toward the one spot where the stones of the
foundation showed themselves clear of all encumbering objects.  As
I saw how numerous these articles were, and how small a portion of
the wall itself was really visible, I had my first practical fear,
and a practical fear soon puts imaginary ones to flight.  What if
some huge box or case of bottles should have been piled up in front
of the marked brick I was seeking?  I am strong, but I could not
move such an object alone, and this search was a solitary one; I
had been forbidden to seek help.

The anxiety this possibility involved nerved me to instant action.
I leaped forward to the one clear spot singled out for me by chance
and began a hurried scrutiny of the short strip of wall which was
all that was revealed to me on the right-hand side.  Did it hold
the marked brick?  My little candle shook with eagerness and it was
with difficulty I could see the face of the brick close enough to
determine.  But fortune favored, and presently my eye fell on one
whose surface showed a ruder, scratched cross.  It was in the
lowest row and well within reach of my hand.  If I could move it
the box would soon be in my possession--and what might that box not
contain!

Looking about, I found the furnace and soon the gas-jet which made
attendance upon it possible.  This lit, I could set my candle down,
and yet see plainly enough to work.  I had shears in my pocket.  I
have had a man's training in the handling of tools and felt quite
confident that I could pry this brick out if it was as easily
loosened as Bess had given me to understand.  My first thrust at
the dusty cement inclosing it encouraged me greatly.  It was very
friable and so shallow that my scissors'-point picked it at once.
In five minutes' time the brick was clear, so that I easily lifted
it out and set it on the floor.  The small black hole which was
left was large enough to admit my hand.  I wasted no time thrusting
it in, expecting to feel the box at once and draw it out.  But it
was farther back than I expected, and while I was feeling about
something gave way and fell with a slight, rustling noise down out
of my reach.  Was it the box?  No, for in another instant I had
come in contact with its broken edges and had drawn it out; the
falling object must have been some extra mortar, and it had gone
where?  I did not stop to consider then.  The object in my hand was
too alluring; the size, the shape too suggestive of a package of
folded bonds for me to think of anything but the satisfaction of my
curiosity and the consequent clearing of a very serious mystery.

Just at this moment, one of intense excitement, I heard, or thought
I heard, a stealthy step behind me.  Forcing myself to calmness,
however, I turned and, holding the candle high convinced myself
that I was alone in the cellar.

Carrying the box nearer the light, I pulled off its already
loosened string and lifted the cover.  In doing this I suffered
from no qualms of conscience.  My duty seemed very clear to me, and
the end, a totally impersonal one, more than justified the means.

A folded paper met my eyes--one--not of the kind I expected; then
some letters whose address I caught at a glance.  "Elizabeth
Brainard"--a discovery which might have stayed my hand at another
time, but nothing could stay it now.  I opened the paper and looked
at it.  Alas!  it was only her marriage certificate; I had taken
all this trouble and all this risk, only to rescue for her the
proof of her union with one John Silverthorn Brainard.  The same
name was on her letters.  Why had Bess so strongly insisted on a
secret search, and why had she concealed her license in so strange
a place?

Greatly sobered, I restored the paper to its place in the box,
slipped on the string and prepared to leave the cellar with it.
Then I remembered the brick on the floor and the open hole where it
had been, and afterward the something which had fallen over within
and what this space might mean in a seemingly solid wall.

More excited now even than I had been at any time before, I thrust
my hand in again and tried to sound the depth of this unexpected
far-reaching hole; but the size of my arm stood in the way of my
experiment, and, drawing out my hand, I looked about for a stick
and finding one, plunged that in.  To my surprise and growing
satisfaction it went in its full length--about three feet.  There
was a cavity on the other side of this wall of very sizable
dimensions.  Had I struck the suspected passage?  I had great hope
of it.  Nothing else would account for so large a space on the
other side of a wall which gave every indication of being one with
the foundation.  Catching up my stick I made a rude estimate of its
location, after which I replaced the brick, put out the gas, and
caught up Bess' box.  Trembling, and more frightened now than at my
descent at my own footfall and tremulous pursuing shadow, I went
up-stairs.

As I passed the corridor leading to the converted vestibule which
had so excited my interest in the afternoon, I paused and made a
hurried calculation.  If the stick had been three feet long, as I
judged, and my stride was thirty inches, then the place of that
hole in the wall below was directly in a line with where I now
stood,--in other words, under the vestibule floor, as I had
already, suspected.

How was I to verify this without disturbing Mrs. Packard?  That
was a question to sleep on.  But it took me a long time to get to
sleep.




CHAPTER XIV

I SEEK HELP


A bad night, a very bad night, but for all that I was down early
the next morning.  Bess must have her box and I a breath of fresh
air before breakfast, to freshen me up a bit and clear my mind for
the decisive act, since my broken rest had failed to refresh me.

As I reached the parlor floor Nixon came out of the reception-room.

"Oh, Miss!" he exclaimed, "going out?" surprised, doubtless, to see
me in my hat and jacket.

"A few steps," I answered, and then stopped, not a little
disturbed; for in moving to open the door he had discovered that
the key was not in it and was showing his amazement somewhat
conspicuously.

"Mrs. Packard took the key up to her room," I explained, thinking
that some sort of explanation was in order.  "She is nervous, you
know, and probably felt safer with it there."

The slow shake of his head had a tinge of self-reproach in it.

"I was sorry to go out," he muttered.  "I was very sorry to go
out,"--but the look which he turned upon me the next minute was of
a very different sort.  "I don't see how you can go out yet," said
he, "unless you go by the back way.  That leads into Stanton
Street; but perhaps you had just as lief go into Stanton Street."

There was impertinence in his voice as well as aggressiveness in
his eye, but I smiled easily enough and was turning toward the back
with every expectation of going by way of Stanton Street, when
Letty came running down the stairs with the key in her hand.  I
don't think he was pleased, but he opened the door civilly enough
and I gladly went out, taking with me, however, a remembrance of
the furtive look with which he had noted the small package in my
hand.  I pass over the joy with which Bess received the box and its
desired contents.  I had lost all interest in the matter, which was
so entirely personal to herself, and, declining the ten dollars
which I knew she could ill afford, made my visit so short that I
was able to take a brisk walk down the street and yet be back in
time for breakfast.

This, like that of the preceding day, I took alone.  Mrs. Packard
was well but preferred to eat up-stairs.  I did not fret at this;
I was really glad, for now I could think and plan my action quite
unembarrassed by her presence. The opening under the vestibule
floor was to be sounded, and sounded this very morning, but on what
pretext?  I could not take Mrs. Packard into my counsel, for that
would be to lessen the force of the discovery with which I yet
hoped to dissipate at one blow the superstitious fears I saw it
was otherwise impossible to combat.  I might interest Ellen, and I
was quite certain that I could interest the cook; but this meant
Nixon, also, who was always around and whose animosity to myself
was too mysteriously founded for me to trust him with any of my
secrets or to afford him any inkling of my real reason for being in
the house.

Yet help I must have and very efficient help, too.  Should I
telegraph to Mayor Packard for some sort of order which would lead
to the tearing up of this end of the house?  I could not do this
without fuller explanations than I could give in a telegram.
Besides, he was under sufficient pressure just now for me to spare
him the consideration of so disturbing a matter, especially as he
had left a substitute behind whose business it was, not only to
relieve Mrs. Packard in regard to the libelous paragraph, but in
all other directions to which his attention might be called.  I
would see Mr. Steele; he would surely be able to think up some
scheme by which that aperture might be investigated without
creating too much disturbance in the house.

An opportunity for doing this was not long in presenting itself.
Mr. Steele came in about nine o'clock and passed at once into the
study.  The next moment I was knocking at his door, my heart in any
mouth, but my determination strung up to the point of daring
anything and everything for the end I had in view.

Fortunately he came to the door; I could never have entered without
his encouragement.  As I met his eye I was ashamed of the color my
cheeks undoubtedly showed, but felt reconciled the next minute, for
he was not quite disembarrassed himself, though he betrayed it by
a little extra paleness rather than by a flush, such as had so
disturbed myself.  Both of us were quite natural in a moment,
however, and answering his courteous gesture I stepped in and at
once opened up my business.

"You must pardon me," said I, "for this infringement upon the usual
rules of this office.  I have something very serious to say about
Mrs. Packard--oh, she's quite well; it has to do with a matter I
shall presently explain--and I wish to make a request."

"Thank you for the honor," he said, drawing up a chair for me.

But I did not sit, neither did I speak for a moment.  I was
contemplating his features and thinking how faultless they were.

"I hardly know where to begin," I ventured at last.  "I am burdened
with a secret, and it may all appear puerile to you.  I don't know
whether to remind you first of Mayor Packard's intense desire to
see his wife's former cheerfulness restored--a task in which I have
been engaged to assist--or to plunge at once into my discoveries,
which are a little peculiar and possibly important, in spite of my
short acquaintance with the people under this roof and the nature
of my position here."

"You excite me," were his few quick but sharply accentuated words.
"What secret?  What discoveries?  I didn't know that the house held
any that were worth the attention of sensible persons like
ourselves."

I had not been looking at him directly, but I looked up at this and
was astonished to find that his interest in what I had said was
greater than appeared from his tone or even from his manner.

"You know the cause of Mrs. Packard's present uneasiness?" I asked.

"Mayor Packard told me--the paragraph which appeared in yesterday
morning's paper.  I have tried to find out its author, but I have
failed so far."

"That is a trifle," I said.  "The real cause--no, I prefer to
stand," I put in, for he was again urging me by a gesture to seat
myself.

"The real cause--" he repeated.

"--is one you will smile at, but which you must nevertheless
respect.  She thinks--she has confided to us, in fact--that she has
seen, within these walls, what many others profess to have seen.
You understand me, Mr. Steele?"

"I don't know that I do, Miss Saunders."

"I find it hard to speak it; you have heard, of course, the common
gossip about this house."

"That it is haunted?" he smiled, somewhat disdainfully.

"Yes.  Well, Mrs. Packard believes that she has seen what--what
gives this name to the house."

"A ghost?"

"Yes, a ghost--in the library one night."

"Ah!"

The ejaculation was eloquent.  I did not altogether understand it,
but its chief expression seemed to be contempt.  I began to fear he
would not have sufficient sympathy with such an unreasoning state
of mind to give me the attention and assistance I desired.  He saw
the effect it had upon me and hastened to say:

"The impression Mrs. Packard has made upon me was of a common-sense
woman.  I'm sorry to hear that she is the victim of an
hallucination.  What do you propose to do about it?--for I see that
you have some project in mind."

Then I told him as much of my story as seemed necessary to obtain
his advice and to secure his cooperation.  I confided to him my
theory of the unexplainable sights and sounds which had so
unfortunately aroused Mrs. Packard's imagination, and what I had
done so far to substantiate it.  I did not mention the bonds, nor
tell him of Bess and her box, but led him to think that my
experiments in the cellar had been the result of my discoveries in
the side entrance.

He listened gravely--I hardly feel justified in saying with a
surprise that was complimentary.  I am not sure that it was.  Such
men are difficult to understand.  When I had finished, he remarked
with a smile:

"So you conclude that the floor of this place is movable and that
the antiquated ladies you mention have stretched their old limbs in
a difficult climb, just for the game of frightening out tenants
they did not desire for neighbors?"

"I know that it sounds ridiculous," I admitted, refraining still,
in spite of the great temptation, from mentioning the treasure
which it was the one wish of their lives to protect from the
discovery of others.  "If they were quite sane I should perhaps not
have the courage to suggest this explanation of what has been heard
and seen here.  But they are not quite sane; a glance at their faces
is enough to convince one of this, and from minds touched with
insanity anything can be expected.  Will you go with me to this side
entrance and examine the floor for yourself?  The condition of things
under it I will ask you to take my word for; you will hardly wish to
visit the cellar on an exploring expedition till you are reasonably
assured of its necessity."

His eye, which had grown curiously cold and unresponsive through
this, turned from me toward the desk before which he had been
sitting.  It was heaped high with a batch of unopened letters, and
I could readily understand what was in his mind.

"You will be helping the mayor more by listening to me," I
continued earnestly, "than by anything you can do here.  Believe
me, Mr. Steele, I am no foolish, unadvised girl.  I know what I am
talking about."

He suppressed an impatient sigh and endeavored to show a proper
appreciation of my own estimate of myself and the value of my
communication.

"I am at your service," said he.

I wished he had been a little more enthusiastic, but, careful not
to show my disappointment, I added, as I led the way to the door:

"I wish we could think of some way of securing ourselves from
interruption.  Nixon does not like me, and will be sure to interest
himself in our movements if he sees us go down that hall together."

"Is there any harm in that?"

"There might be.  He is suspicious of me, which makes it impossible
for one to count upon his conduct.  If he saw us meddling with the
cabinet, he would be very apt to rush with his complaints to Mrs.
Packard, and I am not ready yet to take her into our confidence.
I want first to be sure that my surmises are correct."

"You are quite right." If any sarcasm tinged this admission, he
successfully hid it.  "I think I can dispose of Nixon for a short
time," he went on.  "You are bent upon meddling with that vestibule
floor?"

"Yes."

"Even if I should advise not?"

"Yes, Mr. Steele; even if you roused the household and called Mrs.
Packard down to witness my folly.  But I should prefer to make my
experiments quickly and without any other witness than yourself.
I am not without some pride to counterbalance my presumption."

We had come to a stand before the door as I said this.  As I
finished, he laid his hand on the knob, saying kindly:

"Your wishes shall be considered.  Take a seat in the library, Miss
Saunders, and in a few moments I will join you.  I have a task for
Nixon which will keep him employed for some time."

At this he opened the door and I glided out. Making my way to the
library I hastened in and threw myself into one of its great
chairs.  In another minute I heard Mr. Steele summon Nixon, and in
the short interview which followed between them heard enough to
comprehend that he was loading the old butler's arms with a large
mass of documents and papers for immediate consumption in the
furnace.  Nixon was not to leave till they were all safely
consumed.  The grumble which followed from the old fellow's lips
was not the most cheerful sound in the world, but he went back with
his pile.  Presently I heard the furnace door rattle and caught the
smell, which I was careful to explain to Ellen as she went by the
library door on her way up-stairs, lest Mrs. Packard should be
alarmed and come running down to see what was the matter.

The next moment Mr. Steele appeared in the doorway.

"Now what are we to do?" said he.

I led the way to what I have sometimes called "the recess" for lack
of a better name.

"This is the place," I cried, adding a few explanations as I saw
the curiosity with which he now surveyed its various features.
"Don't you see now that cabinet leans to the left?  I declare it
leans more than it did yesterday; the floor certainly dips at that
point."

He cast a glance where I pointed and instinctively put out his
hand, but let it fall as I remarked:

"The cabinet is not so very heavy.  If I take out a few of those
big pieces of pottery, don't you think we could lift it away from
this corner?"

"And what would you do then?"

"Tear up the carpet and see what is the matter with this part of
the floor.  Perhaps we shall find not only that, but something else
of a still more interesting nature"

He was standing on the sill of what had been the inner doorway.  As
I said these words he fell back in careless grace against the panel
and remained leaning there in an easy attitude, assumed possibly
just to show me with what incredulity, and yet with what kindly
forbearance he regarded my childish enthusiasm.

"I don't understand," said he.  "What do you expect to find?"

"Some spring or button by which this floor is made to serve the
purpose of a trap.  I'm sure that there is an opening underneath--a
large opening.  Won't you help me--"

I forgot to finish.  In my eagerness to impress him I had turned in
his direction, and was staring straight at his easy figure and
faintly smiling features, when the molding against which he leaned
caught my eye.  With a total absence of every other thought than
the idea which had suddenly come to me, I sprang forward and
pressed with my whole weight against one of the edges of the
molding which had a darker hue about it than the rest.  I felt it
give, felt the floor start from under me at the same moment, and in
another heard the clatter and felt the force of the toppling
cabinet on my shoulder as it and I went shooting down into the hole
I had been so anxious to penetrate, though not in just this
startling fashion.

The cry, uttered by Mr. Steele as I disappeared from before his
eyes, was my first conscious realization of what had happened after
I had struck the ground below.

"Are you hurt?" he cried, with real commiseration, as he leaned
over to look for me in the hollow at his feet.  "Wait and I will
drop down to you," he went on, swinging himself into a position to
leap.

I was trembling with the shock and probably somewhat bruised, but
not hurt enough to prevent myself from scrambling to my feet, as he
slid down to my side and offered me his arm for support.

"What did you do?" he asked.  "Was it you who made this trap give
way?  I see that it is a trap now,"--and he pointed to the square
boarding hampered by its carpet which hung at one side.

"I pressed one of those round knobs in the molding," I explained,
laughing to hide the tears of excitement in my eyes.  "It had a
loose look.  I did it without thinking,--that is, without thinking
enough of what I was doing to be sure that I was in a safe enough
position for such an experiment.  But I'm all right, and so is the
cabinet.  See!"  I pointed to where it stood, still upright,
its contents well shaken up but itself in tolerably good condition.

"You are fortunate," said he.  "Shall I help you up out of this?
Your curiosity must be amply satisfied."

"Not yet, not yet," I cried.  "Oh! it is as I thought," I now
exclaimed, peering around the corner of the cabinet into a place of
total darkness.  "The passage is here, running directly under the
alley-way.  Help me, help me, I must follow it to the end.  I'm
sure it communicates with the house next door."

He had to humor me.  I already had one hand on the cabinet's edge,
and should have pushed it aside by my own strength if he had not
interfered.  The space we were in was so small, some four feet
square, I should judge, that the utmost we could do was to shove
one corner of it slightly aside, so as to make a narrow passage
into the space beyond.  Through this I slipped and should have
stepped recklessly on if he had not caught me back and suggested
that he go first into what might have its own pitfalls and dangers.

I did not fear these, but was glad, nevertheless, to yield to his
suggestion and allow him to pass me.  As he did so, he took out a
match from his pocket and in another moment had lit and held it
out.  A long, narrow vaulting met our eyes, very rude and propped
up with beams in an irregular way.  It was empty save for a wooden
stool or some such object which stood near our feet.  Though the
small flame was insufficient to allow us to see very far, I was
sure that I caught the outlines of a roughly made door at the
extreme end and was making for this door, careless of his judgment
and detaining hand, when a quick, strong light suddenly struck me
in the face.  In the square hollow made by the opening of this
door, I saw the figure of Miss Charity with a lighted lantern in
her hand.  She was coming my way.  the secret of the ghostly
visitations which had deceived so many people was revealed.




CHAPTER XV

HARDLY A COINCIDENCE


The old lady's eyes met ours without purpose or intelligence.  It
was plain that she did not see us; also plain that she was held
back in her advance by some doubt in her beclouded brain.  We could
see her hover, as it were, at her end of the dark passage, while I
held my breath and Mr. Steele panted audibly.  Then gradually she
drew back and disappeared behind the door, which she forgot to
shut, as we could tell from the gradually receding light and the
faint fall of her footsteps after the last dim flicker had faded
away.

When she was quite gone, Mr. Steele spoke:

"You must be satisfied now," he said.  "Do you still wish to go on,
or shall we return and explain this accident to the girls whose
voices I certainly hear in the hall overhead?"

"We must go back," I reluctantly consented.  A wild idea had
crossed my brain of following out my first impulse and of charging
Miss Charity in her own house with the visits which had from time
to time depopulated this house.

"I shall leave you to make the necessary explanations," said he.
"I am really rushed with business and should be down-town on the
mayor's affairs at this very moment."

"I am quite ready," said I.  Then as I squeezed my way through
between the corner of the cabinet and the foundation wall, I could
not help asking him how he thought it possible for these old ladies
to mount to the halls above from the bottom of the four-foot hole
in which we now stood.

"The same way in which I now propose that you should," he replied,
lifting into view the object we had seen at one side of the
passage, and which now showed itself to be a pair of folding steps.
"Canny enough to discover or perhaps to open this passage, they
were canny enough to provide themselves with means of getting out
of it.  Shall I help you?"

"In a minute," I said.  "I am so curious.  How do you suppose they
worked this trap from here?  They did not press the spring in the
molding."

He pointed to one side of the opening, where part of the supporting
mechanism was now visible.

"They worked that.  It is all simple enough on this side of the
trap; the puzzle is about the other.  How did they manage to have
all this mechanism put in without rousing any one's attention?  And
why so much trouble?"

"Some time I will tell you," I replied, putting my foot on the
step.  "O girls!" I exclaimed, as two screams rang out above and
two agitated faces peered down upon us.  "I've had an accident and
a great adventure, but I've solved the mystery of the ghost.  It
was just one of the two poor old ladies next door.  They used to
come up through this trap.  Where is Mrs. Packard?"

They were too speechless with wonder to answer me.  I had to reach
up my arms twice before either of them would lend me a helping
hand.  But when I was once up and Mr. Steele after me, the questions
they asked came so thick and fast that I almost choked in my endeavor
to answer them and to get away.  Nixon appeared in the middle of it,
and, congratulating myself that Mr. Steele had been able to slip
away to the study while I was talking to the girls, I went over the
whole story again for his benefit, after which I stopped abruptly
and asked again where Mrs. Packard was.

Nixon, with a face as black as the passage from which I had just
escaped, muttered some words about queer doings for respectable
people, but said nothing about his mistress unless the few words he
added to his final lament about the cabinet contained some allusion
to her fondness for the articles it held.  We could all see that
they had suffered greatly from their fall. Annoyed at his manner,
which was that of a man personally aggrieved, I turned to Ellen.
"You have just been up-stairs," I said.  "Is Mrs. Packard still in
the nursery?"

"She was, but not more than five minutes ago she slipped down-
stairs and went out.  It was just before the noise you made falling
down into this hole."

Out!  I was sorry; I wanted to disburden myself at once.

"Well, leave everything as it is," I commanded, despite the
rebellion in Nixon's eye.  "I will wait in the reception-room till
she returns and then tell her at once.  She can blame nobody but
me, if she is displeased at what she sees."

Nixon grumbled something and moved off.  The girls, full of talk,
ran up-stairs to have it out in the nursery with Letty, and I went
toward the front.  How long I should have to stay there before Mrs.
Packard's return I did not know.  She might stay away an hour and
she might stay away all day.  I could simply wait.  But it was a
happy waiting.  I should see a renewal of joy in her and a bounding
hope for the future when once I told any tale.  It was enough to
keep me quiet for the three long hours I sat there with my face to
the window, watching for the first sight of her figure on the
crossing leading into our street.

When it came, it was already lunch-time, but there was no evidence
of hurry in her manner; there was, rather, an almost painful
hesitation.  As she drew nearer, she raised her eyes to the house-
front and I saw with what dread she approached it, and what courage
it took for her to enter it at all.

The sight of my face at the window altered her expression, however,
and she came quite cheerfully up the steps.  Careful to forestall
Nixon in his duty, I opened the front door, and, drawing her into
the room where I had been waiting, I blurted out my whole story
before she could remove her hat.

"O Mrs. Packard," I cried, "I have such good news for you.  The
thing you feared hasn't any meaning.  The house was never haunted;
the shadows which have been seen here were the shadows of real
beings.  There is a secret entrance to this house, and through it
the old ladies next door, have come from time to time in search of
their missing bonds, or else to frighten off all other people from
the chance of finding them.  Shall I show you where the place is?"

Her face, when I began, had shown such changes I was startled; but
by the time I had finished a sort of apathy had fallen across it
and her voice sounded hollow as she cried: "What are you telling
me?  A secret entrance we knew nothing about and the Misses Quinlan
using it to hunt about these halls at night!  Romantic, to be sure.
Yes, let me see the place.  It is very interesting and very
inconvenient.  Will you tell Nixon, please, to have this passage
closed?"

I felt a chill.  If it was interest she felt it was a very forced
one.  She even paused to take off her hat.  But when I had drawn
her through the library into the side hall, and shown her the great
gap where the cabinet had stood, I thought she brightened a little
and showed some of the curiosity I expected.  But it was very
easily appeased, and before I could have made the thing clear to
her she was back in the library, fingering her hat and listening,
as it seemed to me, to everything but my voice.

I did not understand it.

Making one more effort I came up close to her and impetuously cried
out:

"Don't you see what this does to the phantasm you professed to have
seen yourself once in this very spot?  It proves it a myth, a
product of your own imagination, something which it must certainly
be impossible for you ever to fear again.  That is why I made the
search which has ended in this discovery.  I wanted to rid you of
your forebodings.  Do assure me that I have.  It will be such a
comfort to me--and how much more to the mayor!"

Her lack-luster eyes fell; her fingers closed on the hat whose
feathers she had been trifling with, and, lifting it, she moved
softly into the reception-room and from there into the hall and up
the front stairs.  I stood aghast; she had not even heard what I
had been saying.

By the time I had recovered my equanimity enough to follow, she had
disappeared into her own room.  It could not have been in a very
comfortable condition, for there were evidences about the hall that
it was being thoroughly swept.  As I endeavored to pass the door,
I inadvertently struck the edge of a little taboret standing in my
way.  It toppled and a little book lying on it slid to the floor;
as I stooped to pick it up my already greatly disconcerted mind was
still further affected by the glimpse which was given me of its
title.  It was this

    THE ECCENTRICITIES OF GHOSTS AND COINCIDENCES
          SUGGESTING SPIRITUAL INTERFERENCE

Struck forcibly by a coincidence suggesting something quite
different from spiritual interference, I allowed the book to open
in my hand, which it did at this evidently frequently conned
passage:


 A book was in my hand and a strong light was shining on it and
 on me from a lamp on a near-by table.  The story was interesting
 and I was following the adventures it was relating, with eager
 interest, when  suddenly the character of the light changed, a
 mist seemed to pass before my eyes and, on my looking up, I saw
 standing between me and  the lamp the figure of a man, which
 vanished as I looked, leaving in my breast an unutterable dread
 and in my memory the glare of two  unearthly eyes whose menace
 could mean but one thing--death.

 The next day I received news of a fatal accident to my husband.


I closed the little volume with very strange thoughts.  If Mayor
Packard had believed himself to have received an explanation of his
wife's strange condition in the confession she had made of having
seen an apparition such as this in her library, or if I had
believed myself to have touched the bottom of the mystery absorbing
this unhappy household in my futile discoveries of the human and
practical character of the visitants who had haunted this house,
then Mayor Packard and I had made a grave mistake.




CHAPTER XVI

IN THE LIBRARY


I was still in Mrs. Packard's room, brooding over the enigma
offered by the similarity between the account I had just read and
the explanation she had given of the mysterious event which had
thrown such a cloud over her life, when, moved by some unaccountable
influence, I glanced up and saw Nixon standing in the open doorway,
gazing at me with an uneasy curiosity I was sorry enough to have
inspired.

"Mrs. Packard wants you," he declared with short ceremony.  "She's
in the library."  And, turning on his heel, he took his deliberate
way down-stairs.

I followed hard after him, and, being brisk in my movements, was at
his back before he was half-way to the bottom.  He seemed to resent
this, for he turned a baleful look back at me and purposely delayed
his steps without giving me the right of way.

"Is Mrs. Packard in a hurry?" I asked.  "If so, you had better let
me pass."

He gave no appearance of having heard me; his attention had been
caught by something going on at the rear of the hall we were now
approaching.  Following his anxious glance, I saw the door of the
mayor's study open and Mrs. Packard come out.  As we reached the
lower step, she passed us on her way to the library.  Wondering
what errand had taken her to the study, which she was supposed not
to visit, I turned to join her and caught a glimpse of the old
man's face.  It was more puckered, scowling and malignant of aspect
than usual.  I was surprised that Mrs. Packard had not noticed it.
Surely it was not the countenance of a mere disgruntled servant.
Something not to be seen on the surface was disturbing this old
man; and, moving in the shadows as I was, I questioned whether it
would not conduce to some explanation between Mrs. Packard
and myself if I addressed her on the subject of this old serving-
man's peculiar ways.

But the opportunity for doing this did not come that morning.  On
entering the library I was met by Mrs. Packard with the remark:

"Have you any interest in politics?  Do you know anything about the
subject?"

"I have an interest in Mayor Packard's election," I smilingly
assured her; "and I know that in this I represent a great number of
people in this town if not in the state."

"You want to see him governor?  You desired this before you came to
this house?  You believe him to be a good man--the right man for
the place?"

"I certainly do, Mrs. Packard."

"And you represent a large class who feel the same?"

"I think so, Mrs. Packard."

"I am so glad!"  Her tone was almost hysterical.  "My heart is set
on this election," she ardently explained.  "It means so much this
year.  My husband is very ambitious.  So am I--for him.  I would
give--" there she paused, caught back, it would seem, by some
warning thought.  I took advantage of her preoccupation to
scrutinize her features more closely than I had dared to do while
she was directly addressing me.  I found them set in the stern mold
of profound feeling--womanly feeling, no doubt, but one actuated by
causes far greater than the subject, serious as it was, apparently
called for.  She would give--

What lay beyond that give?

I never knew, for she never finished her sentence.

Observing the breathless interest her manner evoked, or possibly
realizing how nearly she had come to an unnecessary if not unwise
self-betrayal, she suddenly smoothed her brow and, catching up a
piece of embroidery from the table, sat down with it in her hand.

"A wife is naturally heart and soul with her husband," she
observed, with an assumption of composure which restored some sort
of naturalness to the conversation.  "You are a thinking person, I
see, and what is more, a conscientious one.  There are many, many
such in town; many amongst the men as well as amongst the women.
Do you think I am in earnest about this--that Mr. Packard's chances
could be affected by--by anything that might be said about me?  You
saw, or heard us say, at least, that my name had been mentioned in
the morning paper in a way not altogether agreeable to us.  It was
false, of course, but--"  She started, and her work fell from her
hands.  The door-bell had rung and we could hear Nixon in the hall
hastening to answer it.

"Miss Saunders," she hurriedly interposed with a great effort to
speak naturally, "I have told Nixon that I wish to see Mr. Steele
if he comes in this morning.  I wish to speak to him about the
commission intrusted to him by my husband.  I confess Mr. Steele
has not inspired me with the confidence that Mr. Packard feels in
him and I rather shrink from this interview.  Will you be good
enough--rather will you show me the great kindness of sitting on
that low divan by the fireplace where you will not be visible--see,
you may have my work to busy yourself with--and if--he may not,
you know--if he should show the slightest disposition to transgress
in any way, rise and show yourself?"

I was conscious of flushing slightly, but she was not looking my
way, and the betrayal cost me only a passing uneasiness.  She had,
quite without realizing it, offered me the one opportunity I most
desired.  In my search for a new explanation of Mrs. Packard's
rapidly changing moods, I had returned to my first suspicion--the
attraction and possibly the passion of the handsome secretary for
herself.  I had very little reason for entertaining such a
possibility.  I had seen nothing on his part to justify it and but
little on hers.

Yet in the absence of every other convincing cause of trouble I
allowed myself to dwell on this one, and congratulated myself upon
the chance she now offered me of seeing and hearing how he would
comport himself when he thought that he was alone with her.
Assured by the sounds in the hall that Mr. Steele was approaching,
I signified my acquiescence with her wishes, and, taking the
embroidery from her hand, sat down in the place she had pointed
out.

I heard the deep breath she drew, forgot in an instant my purpose
of questioning her concerning Nixon, and settled myself to listen,
not only to such words as must inevitably pass between them, but to
their tones, to the unconscious sigh, to whatever might betray his
feeling toward her or hers toward him, convinced as I now was that
feeling of some kind lay back of an interview which she feared to
hold without the support of another's secret presence.

The calm even tones of the gentleman himself, modulated to an
expression of utmost deference, were the first to break the
silence.

"You wish to see me, Mrs. Packard?"

"Yes."  The tremble in this ordinary monosyllable was slight but
quite perceptible.  "Mr. Packard has given you a task, concerning
the necessity of which I should be glad to learn your opinion.  Do
you think it wise to--to probe into such matters?  Not that I mean
to deter you.  You are under Mr. Packard's orders, but a word from
so experienced a man would be welcome, if only to reconcile me to
an effort which must lead to the indiscriminate use of my name in
quarters where it hurts a woman to imagine it used at all."

This, with her eyes on his face, of this I felt sure.  Her tone was
much too level for her not to be looking directly at him.  To any
response he might give of the same nature I had no clue, but his
tone when he answered was as cool and deferentially polite as was
to be expected from a man chosen by Mayor Packard for his private
secretary. "Mrs. Packard, your fears are very natural.  A woman
shrinks from such inquiries, even when sustained by the
consciousness that nothing can rob her name of its deserved honor.
But if we let one innuendo pass, how can we prevent a second?  The
man who did this thing should be punished.  In this I agree with
Mayor Packard."

She stirred impulsively.  I could hear the rustle of her dress as
she moved, probably to lessen the distance between them. "You are
honest with me?" she urged.  "You do agree with Mr. Packard in
this?"

His answer was firm, straightforward, and, as far as I could judge,
free from any objectionable feature. "I certainly do, Mrs. Packard.
The hesitation I expressed when he first spoke was caused by the
one consideration mentioned,--my fear lest something might go amiss
in C---- to-night if I busied myself otherwise than with the
necessities of the speech with which he is about to open his
campaign."

"I see.  You are very desirous that Mr. Packard should win in this
election?"

"I am his secretary, and was largely instrumental in securing his
nomination for governor," was the simple reply. There was a pause
--how filled, I would have given half my expected salary to know.
Then I heard her ask him the very question she had asked me.

"Do you think that in the event of your not succeeding in forcing
an apology from the man who inserted that objectionable paragraph
against myself--that--that such hints of something being wrong with
me will in any way affect Mr. Packard's chances--lose him votes, I
mean?  Will the husband suffer because of some imagined lack in his
wife?"

"One can not say."  Thus appealed to, the man seemed to weigh his
words carefully, out of consideration for her, I thought.  "No real
admirer of the mayor's would go over to the enemy from any such
cause as that.  Only the doubtful--the half-hearted--those who are
ready to grasp at any excuse for voting with the other party, would
allow a consideration of the mayor's domestic relations to
interfere with their confidence in him as a public officer."

"But these--"  How I wish I could have seen her face!  "These
half-hearted voters, their easily stifled convictions are what make
majorities," she stammered.  Mr. Steele may have bowed; he probably
did, for she went on confidently and with a certain authority not
observable in the tone of her previous remarks.  "You are right.
The paragraph reflecting on me must be traced to its source.  The
lie must be met and grappled with.  I was not well last week and
showed it, but I am perfectly well to-day and am resolved to show
that, too.  No skeleton hangs in the Packard closet.  I am a happy
wife and a happy mother.  Let them come here and see.  This morning
I shall issue invitations for a dinner to be given the first night
you can assure me Mr. Packard will be at home.  Do you know of any
such night?"

"On Friday week he has no speech to make."  Mrs. Packard seemed to
consider.  Finally she said: "When you see him, tell him to leave
that evening free.  And, Mr. Steele, if you will be so good, give
me the names of some of those halfhearted ones--critical people who
have to see in order to believe.  I shall have them at my table
--I shall let them see that the shadow which enveloped me was
ephemeral; that a woman can rise above all weakness in the support
of a husband she loves and honors as I do Mr. Packard."

She must have looked majestic.  Her voice thrilling with
anticipated triumph rang through the room, awaking echoes which
surely must have touched the heart of this man if, as I had
sometimes thought, he cherished an unwelcome admiration for her.

But when he answered, there was no hint in his finely modulated
tones of any chord having been touched in his breast, save the
legitimate one of respectful appreciation of a woman who fulfilled
the expectation of one alive to what is admirable in her sex.

"Your idea is a happy one," said he.  "I can give you three names
now.  Those of Judge Whittaker, Mr. Dumont, the lawyer, and the two
Mowries, father and son."

"Thank you.  I am indebted to you, Mr. Steele, for the patience
with which you have met and answered my doubts."

He made some reply, added something about not seeing her again till
he returned with the mayor, then I heard the door open and quietly
shut. The interview was over, without my having felt called upon to
show myself. An interval of silence, and then I heard her voice.
She had thrown herself down at the piano and was singing gaily,
ecstatically.

Approaching her in undisguised wonder at this new mood, I stood at
her back and listened.  I do not suppose she had what is called a
great voice, but the feeling back of it at this moment of reaction
gave it a great quality.  The piece--some operatic aria--was sung
in a way to thrill the soul.  Opening with a burst, it ended with
low notes of an intense sweetness like sobs, not of grief, but
happiness.  In their midst and while the tones sank deepest, a
child's voice rose in the hall and we heard, uttered at the very
door:

"Mama busy; mama sing."

With a cry she sprang from the piano and, bounding to the door,
flung it open and caught her child in her arms.

"Darling!  darling!  my darling!" she exclaimed in a burst of
mother-rapture, crushing the child to her breast and kissing it
repeatedly.

Then she began to dance, holding the baby in her arms and humming
a waltz.  As I stood on one side in my own mood of excited
sympathy, I caught fleeting glimpses of their two faces, as she
went whirling about.  Hers was beautiful in her new relief--if it
was a relief--the child's dimpled with delight at the rapid
movement--a lovely picture.  Letty, who stood waiting in the
doorway, showed a countenance full of surprise.  Mrs. Packard was
the first to feel tired.  Stopping her dance, she peered round at
the baby's face and laughed.

"Was that good?" she asked.  "Are you glad to have mama merry
again?  I am going to be merry all the time now.  With such a dear,
dear dearie of a baby, how can I help it?"  And whirling about in
my direction, she held up the child for inspection, crying: "Isn't
she a darling!  Do you wonder at my happiness?"

Indeed I did not; the sweet baby-face full of glee was
irresistible; so was the pat-pat of the two dimpled hands on her
mother's shoulders.  With a longing all women can understand, I
held out my own arms.

"I wonder if she will come to me?" said I.

But though I got a smile, the little hands closed still more
tightly round the mother's neck.

"Mama dear!" she cried, "mama dear!" and the tender emphasis on the
endearing word completed the charm.  Tears sprang to Mrs. Packard's
eyes, and it was with difficulty that she passed the clinging child
over to the nurse waiting to take her out.

"That was the happiest moment of my life!" fell unconsciously from
Mrs. Packard's lips as the two disappeared; but presently, meeting
my eyes, she blushed and made haste to remark:

"I certainly did Mr. Steele an arrant injustice.  He was very
respectful; I wonder how I ever got the idea he could be anything
else."

Anxious myself about this very fact, I attempted to reply, but she
gave me no opportunity.

"And now for those dinner invitations!" she gaily suggested.
"While I feel like it I must busy myself in making out my list.  It
will give me something new to think about."




CHAPTER XVIII

THE TWO WEIRD SISTERS


Ellen seemed to understand my anxiety about Mrs. Packard and to
sympathize with it.  That afternoon as I passed her in the hall she
whispered softly:

"I have just been unpacking that bag and putting everything back
into place.  She told me she had packed it in readiness to go with
Mr. Packard if he desired it at the last minute."

I doubted this final statement, but the fact that the bag had been
unpacked gave me great relief.  I began to look forward with much
pleasure to a night of unbroken rest.

Alas! rest was not for me yet.  Relieved as to Mrs. Packard, I
found my mind immediately reverting to the topic which had before
engrossed it, though always before in her connection.  The mystery
of the so-called ghosts had been explained, but not the loss of the
bonds, which had driven my poor neighbors mad.  This was still a
fruitful subject of thought, though I knew that such well-balanced
and practical minds as Mayor Packard's or Mr. Steele's would have
but little sympathy with the theory ever recurring to me.  Could
this money be still in the house?--the possibility of such a fact
worked and worked upon my imagination till I grew as restless as I
had been over the mystery of the ghosts and presently quite as
ready for action.

Possibly the hurried glimpse I had got of Miss Thankful's
countenance a little while before, in the momentary visit she paid
to the attic window at which I had been accustomed to see either
her or her sister constantly sit, inspired me with my present
interest in this old and wearing trouble of theirs and the
condition into which it had thrown their minds. I thought of their
nights of broken rest while they were ransacking the rooms below
and testing over and over the same boards, the same panels for the
secret hiding-place of their lost treasure, of their foolish
attempts to scare away all other intruders, and the racking of
nerve and muscle which must have attended efforts so out of keeping
with their age and infirmities.

It would be natural to regard the whole matter as an hallucination
on their part, to disbelieve in the existence of the bonds, and to
regard Miss Thankful's whole story to Mrs. Packard as the play of
a diseased imagination.

But I could not, would not, carry my own doubts to this extent.
The bonds had been in existence; Miss Thankful had seen them; and
the one question calling for answer now was, whether they had been
long ago found and carried off, or whether they were still within
the reach of the fortunate hand capable of discovering their
hiding-place.

The nurse who, according to Miss Thankful, had wakened such dread
in the dying man's breast as to drive him to the attempt which had
ended in this complete loss of the whole treasure, appeared to me
the chief factor in the first theory.  If any one had ever found
these bonds, it was she; how, it was not for me to say, in my
present ignorant state of the events following the reclosing of the
house after this old man's death and burial.  But the supposition
of an utter failure on the part of this woman and of every other
subsequent resident of the house to discover this mysterious
hiding-place, wakened in me no real instinct of search.  I felt
absolutely and at once that any such effort in my present blind
state of mind would be totally unavailing.  The secret trap and the
passage it led to, with all the opportunities they offered for the
concealment of a few folded documents, did not, strange as it may
appear at first blush, suggest the spot where these papers might be
lying hid.  The manipulation of the concealed mechanism and the
difficulties attending a descent there, even on the part of a well
man, struck me as precluding all idea of any such solution to this
mystery.  Strong as dying men sometimes are in the last flickering
up of life in the speedily dissolving frame, the lowering of this
trap, and, above all, the drawing of it back into place, which I
instinctively felt would be the hardest act of the two, would be
beyond the utmost fire or force conceivable in a dying man.  No,
even if he, as a member of the family, knew of this subterranean
retreat, he could not have made use of it.  I did not even accept
the possibility sufficiently to approach the place again with this
new inquiry in mind.  Yet what a delight lay in the thought of a
possible finding of this old treasure, and the new life which
would follow its restoration to the hands which had once touched
it only to lose it on the instant.

The charm of this idea was still upon me when I woke the next
morning.  At breakfast I thought of the bonds, and in the hour
which followed, the work I was doing for Mrs. Packard in the
library was rendered difficult by the constant recurrence of the
one question into my mind: "What would a man in such a position
do with the money he was anxious to protect from the woman he saw
coming and secure to his sister who had just stepped next door?"
When a moment came at last in which I could really indulge in these
intruding thoughts, I leaned back in my chair and tried to
reconstruct the room according to Mrs. Packard's description of
it at that time.  I even pulled my chair over to that portion of
the room where his bed had stood, and, choosing the spot where
his head would naturally lie, threw back my own on the reclining
chair I had chosen, and allowed my gaze to wander over the walls
before me in a vague hope of reproducing, in my mind, the ideas
which must have passed through his before he rose and thrust
those papers into their place of concealment.  Alas! those walls
were barren of all suggestion, and my eyes went wandering through
the window before me in a vague appeal, when a sudden remembrance
of his last moments struck me sharply and I bounded up with a new
thought, a new idea, which sent me in haste to my room and brought
me down again in hat and jacket.  Mrs. Packard had once said that
the ladies next door were pleased to have callers, and advised me
to visit them.  I would test her judgment in the matter.  Early
though it was, I would present myself at the neighboring door and
see what my reception would be.  The discovery I had made in my
unfortunate accident in the old entry way should be my excuse.
Apologies were in order from us to them; I would make these
apologies.

I was prepared to confront poverty in this bare and
comfortless-looking abode of decayed gentility.  But I did not
expect quite so many evidences of it as met my eyes as the door
swung slowly open some time after my persistent knock, and I
beheld Miss Charity's meager figure outlined against walls and
a flight of uncarpeted stairs such as I had never seen before
out of a tenement house.  I may have dropped my eyes, but I
recovered myself immediately.  Marking the slow awakening of
pleasure in the wan old face as she recognized me, I uttered
some apology for my early call and then waited to see if she
would welcome me in.

She not only did so, but did it with such a sudden breaking up of
her rigidity into the pliancy of a naturally hospitable nature,
that my heart was touched, and I followed her into the great bare
apartment, which must have once answered the purposes of a drawing-
room, with very different feelings from those with which I had been
accustomed to look upon her face in the old attic window.

"I should like to see your sister, too," I said, as she hastily,
but with a certain sort of ceremony, too, pushed forward one of the
ancient chairs which stood at long intervals about the room.  "I
have not been your neighbor very long, but I should like to pay my
respects to both of you."

I had purposely spoken with the formal precision she had been
accustomed to in her earlier days, and I could see how perceptibly
her self-respect returned at this echo of the past, giving her a
sudden dignity which made me forget for the moment her neglected
appearance.

"I will summon my sister," she returned, disappearing quietly from
the room.

I waited fifteen minutes, then Miss Thankful entered, dressed in
her very best, followed by my first acquaintance in her same gown,
but with a little cap on her head.  The cap, despite its faded
ribbons carefully pressed out but with too cold an iron, gave her
an old-time fashionable air which for the moment created the
impression that she might have been a beauty and a belle in her
early days, which I afterward discovered to be true.

It was Miss Thankful, however, who had the personal presence, and
it was she who now expressed their sense of the honor, pushing
forward another chair than that from which I had risen, with the
remark:

"Take this, I pray.  Many an honored guest has occupied this seat.
Let us see you in it."

I could detect no difference between the one she offered and the
one in which I had just sat, but I at once stepped forward and took
the chair she proffered.  She bowed and Miss Charity bowed, and
then they seated themselves side by side on the hair-cloth sofa,
which was the only other article of furniture in the room.

"We are--we are preparing to move," stammered Miss Charity, a faint
flush tingeing her faded cheeks, as she caught the involuntary
glance I had cast about me.

Miss Thankful bridled and gave her sister a look of open rebuke.
She had, as one could instantly see from her strong features and
purposeful ways, been a woman of decided parts and of strict,
upright character.  Weakened as she was, the shadow of an untruth
disturbed her.  Her pride ran in a different groove from that of
her once over-complimented, over-fostered sister.  She was going to
add a protest in words to that expressed by her gesture, but I
hastily prevented this by coming at once to the point of my errand.

"My excuse for this early call," I said, this time addressing Miss
Thankful, "lies in an adventure which occurred to me yesterday in
the adjoining house."  It was painful to see how they both started,
and how they instinctively caught each at the other's hand as they
sat side by side on the sofa, as if only thus they could bear the
shock of what might be coming next.  I had to nerve myself to
proceed.  "You know, or rather I gather from your kind greetings
that you know that I am at present staying with Mrs. Packard.  She
is very kind and we spend many pleasant hours together; but of
course some of the time I have to be alone, and then I try to amuse
myself by looking about at the various interesting things which are
scattered through the house."

A gasp from Miss Charity, a look still more expressive from Miss
Thankful.  I hastened to cut their suspense short.

"You know the little cabinet they have placed in the old entrance
pointing this way?  Well, I was looking at that when the whim
seized me--I hardly know how--to press one of the knobs in the
molding which runs about the doorway, when instantly everything
gave way under me and I fell into a deep hole which had been
scooped out of the alley-way--nobody knows for what."

A cry and they were on their feet, still holding hands and
endeavoring to show nothing but concern for my disaster.

"Oh, I wasn't hurt," I smiled.  "I was frightened, of course, but
not so much as to lose my curiosity.  When I got to my feet again,
I looked about in this surprising hole--"

"It was our uncle's way of reaching his winecellar," Miss Thankful
explained with great dignity as she and her sister sank back into
their seats.  "He had some remarkable old wine, and, as he was
covetous of it, he conceived this way of securing it from
everybody's knowledge but his own.  It was a strange way, but he
was a little touched," she added, laying a slow impressive finger
on her forehead, "just a little touched here."

The short, significant glance she cast at Charity as she said this,
and the little smile she gave were to give me to understand that
this weakness had descended in the family.  I felt my heart
contract; my self-imposed task was a harder one than I had
anticipated, but I could not shirk it now. "Did this wine-cellar
you mention run all the way to this house?" I lightly inquired.  "I
stumbled on a passage leading here, which I thought you ought to
know is now open to any one in Mayor Packard's house.  Of course,
it will be closed soon," I hastened to add as Miss Charity
hurriedly rose at her sister's quick look and anxiously left the
room.  "Mrs. Packard will see to that."

"Yes, yes, I have no doubt; she's a very good woman, a very fair
woman, don't you think so, Miss--"

"My name is Saunders."

"A very good name.  I knew a fine family of that name when I was
younger.  There was one of them--his name was Robert--"  Here she
rambled on for several minutes as if this topic and no other filled
her whole mind; then, as if suddenly brought back to what started
it, she uttered in sudden anxiety, "You think well of Mrs. Packard?
You have confidence in her?"

I allowed myself to speak with all the enthusiasm she so greedily
desired.

"Indeed I have," I cried.  "I think she can be absolutely depended
on to do the right thing every time.  You are fortunate in having
such good neighbors at the time of this mishap."

At this minute Miss Charity reentered.  Her panting condition, as
well as the unsettled position of the cap on her head, told very
plainly where she had been.  Reseating herself, she looked at Miss
Thankful and Miss Thankful looked at her, but no word passed.  They
evidently understood each other.

"I'm obliged to Mrs. Packard," now fell from Miss Thankful's lips,
"and to you, too, young lady, for acquainting us with this
accident.  The passage we extended ourselves after taking up our
abode in this house.  We--we did not see why we should not profit
by our ancestor's old and undiscovered wine-cellar to secure
certain things which were valuable to us."

Her hesitation in uttering this final sentence--a sentence all the
more marked because naturally, she was a very straightforward
person--awoke my doubt and caused me to ask myself what she meant
by this word "secure." Did she mean, as circumstances went to show
and as I had hitherto believed, that they had opened up this
passage for the purpose of a private search in their old home for
the lost valuables they believed to be concealed there?  Or had
they, under some temporary suggestion of their disorganized brains,
themselves hidden away among the rafters of this unexplored spot
the treasure they believed lost and now constantly bewailed?

The doubt thus temporarily raised in my mind made me very uneasy
for a moment, but I soon dismissed it and dropping this subject for
the nonce, began to speak of the houses as they now looked and of
the changes which had evidently been made in them since they had
left the one and entered the other.

"I understand," I ventured at last, "that in those days this house
also had a door opening on the alley-way.  Where did it lead--do
you mind my asking?--into a room or into a hallway?  I am so
interested in old houses."

They did not resent this overt act of curiosity; I had expected
Miss Thankful to, but she didn't.  Some recollection connected with
the name of Saunders had softened her heart toward me and made her
regard with indulgence an interest which she might otherwise have
looked upon as intrusive.

"We long ago boarded up that door," she answered.  "It was of very
little use to us from our old library."

"It looked into one of the rooms then?" I persisted, but with a
wary gentleness which I felt could not offend.

"No; there is no room there, only a passageway.  But it has closets
in it, and we did not like to be seen going to them any time of
day.  The door had glass panes in it, you know, just like a window.
It made the relations so intimate with people only a few feet
away."

"Naturally," I cried, "I don't wonder you wanted to shut them off
if you could."  Then with a sudden access of interest which I
vainly tried to hide, I thought of the closets and said with a
smile, "The closets were for china, I suppose; old families have so
much china."

Miss Charity nodded, complacency in every feature; but Miss
Thankful thought it more decorous to seem to be indifferent in
this matter.

"Yes, china; old pieces, not very valuable.  We gave what we had of
worth to our sister when she married.  We keep other things there,
too, but they are not important.  We seldom go to those closets
now, so we don't mind the darkness."

"I--I dote on old china," I exclaimed, carefully restraining myself
from appearing unduly curious.  "Won't you let me look at it?  I
know that it is more valuable than you think.  It will make me
happy for the whole day, if you will let me see these old pieces.
They may not look beautiful to you, you are so accustomed to them;
but to me every one must have a history, or a history my
imagination will supply."

Miss Charity looked gently but perceptibly frightened.  She shook
her head, saying in her weak, fond tones:

"They are too dusty; we are not such housekeepers as we used to be;
I am ashamed--"

But Miss Thankful's peremptory tones cut her short.

"Miss Saunders will excuse a little dust.  We are so occupied," she
explained, with her eye fixed upon me in almost a challenging way,
"that we can afford little time for unnecessary housework.  If she
wants to see these old relics of a former day, let her.  You,
Charity, lead the way."

I was trembling with gratitude and the hopes I had suppressed, but
I managed to follow the apologetic figure of the humiliated old
lady with a very good grace.  As we quitted the room we were in,
through a door at the end leading into the dark passageway, I
thought of the day when, according to Mrs. Packard's story, Miss
Thankful had come running across the alley and through this very
place to astound her sister and nephew in the drawing-room with the
news of the large legacy destined so soon to be theirs.  That was
two years ago, and to-day--I proceeded no further with what was in
my mind, for my interest was centered in the closet whose door Miss
Charity had just flung open.

"You see," murmured that lady, "that we haven't anything of
extraordinary interest to show you.  Do you want me to hand some of
them down?  I don't believe that it will pay you."

I cast a look at the shelves and felt a real disappointment.  Not
that the china was of too ordinary a nature to attract, but that
the pieces I saw, and indeed the full contents of the shelves,
failed to include what I was vaguely in search of and had almost
brought my mind into condition to expect.

"Haven't you another closet here?" I faltered.  "These pieces are
pretty, but I am sure you have some that are larger and with the
pattern more dispersed--a platter or a vegetable dish."

"No, no," murmured Miss Charity, drawing back as she let the door
slip from her hand.  "Really, Thankful,"--this to her sister who
was pulling open another door,--"the look of those shelves is
positively disreputable--all the old things we have had in the house
for years.  Don't--"

"Oh, do let me see that old tureen up on the top shelf," I put in.
"I like that."

Miss Thankful's long arm went up, and, despite Miss Charity's
complaint that it was too badly cracked to handle, it was soon down
and placed in my hands.  I muttered my thanks, gave utterance to
sundry outbursts of enthusiasm, then with a sudden stopping of my
heart-beats, I lifted the cover and--

"Let me set it down," I gasped, hurriedly replacing the cover.  I
was really afraid I should drop it. Miss Thankful took it from me
and rested it on the edge of the lower shelf.

"Why, how you tremble, child!" she cried.  "Do you like old
Colonial blue ware as well as that?  If you do, you shall have this
piece.  Charity, bring a duster, or, better, a damp cloth.  You
shall have it, yes, you shall have it."

"Wait!" I could hardly speak.  "Don't get a cloth yet.  Come with
me back into the parlor, and bring the tureen.  I want to see it in
full light."

They looked amazed, but they followed me as I made a dash for the
drawing-room, Miss Thankful with the tureen in her hands.  I was
quite Mistress of myself before I faced them again, and, sitting
down, took the tureen on my lap, greatly to Miss Charity's concern
as to the injury it might do my frock.

"There is something I must tell you about myself before I can
accept your gift," I said.

"What can you have to tell us about yourself that could make us
hesitate to bestow upon you such an insignificant piece of old
cracked china?" Miss Thankful asked as I sat looking up at them
with moist eyes and wildly beating heart.

"Only this," I answered.  "I know what perhaps you had rather have
had me ignorant of.  Mrs. Packard told me about the bonds you lost,
and how you thought them still in the house where your brother
died, though no one has ever been able to find them there.  Oh, sit
down," I entreated, as they both turned very pale and looked at
each other in affright.  "I don't wonder that you have felt their
loss keenly; I don't wonder that you have done your utmost to
recover them, but what I do wonder at is that you were so sure they
were concealed in the room where he lay that you never thought of
looking elsewhere.  Do you remember, Miss Quinlan, where his eyes
were fixed at the moment of death?"

"On the window directly facing his bed."

"Gazing at what?"

"Sky--no, the walls of our house."

"Be more definite; at the old side door through which he could see
the closet shelves where this old tureen stood.  During the time
you had been gone, he had realized his sinking condition, and,
afraid of the nurse he saw advancing down the street, summoned all
his strength and rushed with his treasure across the alley-way and
put it in the first hiding-place his poor old eyes fell on.  He may
have been going to give it to you; but you had company, you
remember, in here, and he may have heard voices.  Anyhow, we know
that he put it in the tureen because--" here I lifted the
lid--"because--" I was almost as excited and trembling and beside
myself as they were--"because it is here now."

They looked, then gazed in each other's face and bowed their heads.
Silence alone could express the emotion of that moment.  Then with
a burst of inarticulate cries, Miss Charity rose and solemnly began
dancing up and down the great room.  Her sister looked on with
grave disapproval till the actual nature of the find made its way
into her bewildered mind, then she reached over and plunged her
hand into the tureen and drew out the five bonds which she clutched
first to her breast and then began proudly to unfold.

"Fifty thousand dollars!" she exclaimed.  "We are rich women from
to-day," and as she said it I saw the shrewdness creep beck into
her eyes and the long powerful features take on the expressive
character which they had so pitifully lacked up to the moment.  I
realized that I had been the witness of a miracle.  The reason,
shattered, or, let us say, disturbed by one shock, had been
restored by another.  The real Miss Thankful stood before me.
Meanwhile the weaker sister, dancing still, was uttering jubilant
murmurs to which her feet kept time with almost startling
precision.  But as the other let the words I have recorded here
leave her lips, she came to a sudden standstill and approaching her
lips to Miss Thankful's ear said joyfully:

"We must tell--oh," she hastily interpolated as she caught her
sister's eyes and followed the direction of her pointing finger,
"we have not thanked our little friend, our good little friend who
has done us such an inestimable service."  I felt her quivering
arms fall round my neck, as Miss Thankful removed the tureen and in
words both reasonable and kind expressed the unbounded gratitude
which she herself felt.

"How came you to think?  How came you to care enough to think?"
fell from her lips as she kissed me on the forehead.  "You are a
jewel, little Miss Saunders, and some day--"

But I need not relate all that she said or all the extravagant
things Miss Charity did, or even my own delight, so much greater
even than any I had anticipated, when I first saw this possible
ending of my suddenly inspired idea.  However, Miss Thankful's
words as we parted at the door struck me as strange, showing that
it would be a little while yet before the full balance of her mind
was restored.

"Tell everybody," she cried; "tell Mrs. Packard and all who live in
the house; but keep it secret from the woman who keeps that little
shop.  We are afraid of her; she haunts this neighborhood to get at
these very bonds.  She was the nurse who cared for my brother, and
it was to escape her greed that he hid this money.  If she knew
that we had found these our lives wouldn't be safe.  Wait till we
have them in the bank."

"Assuredly.  I shall tell no one."

"But you must tell those at home," she smiled; and the beaming
light in her kindled eye followed me the few steps I had to take,
and even into the door.

So Bess had been the old man's nurse'!




CHAPTER XVIII

THE MORNING NEWS


That evening I was made a heroine of by Mrs. Packard and all the
other members of the household.  Even Nixon thawed and showed me
his genial side.  I had to repeat my story above stairs--and below,
and relate just what the old ladies had done and said, and how they
bore their joy, and whatever I thought they would do with their
money now they had it.  When I at last reached my room, my first
act was to pull aside my shade and take a peep at the old attic
window.  Miss Charity's face was there, but so smiling and gay I
hardly knew it.  She kissed her hand to me as I nodded my head, and
then turned away with her light as if to show me she had only been
waiting to give me this joyous good night.

This was a much better picture to sleep on than the former one had
been.

Next day I settled back into my old groove.  Mrs. Packard busied
herself with her embroidery and I read to her or played on the
piano.  Happier days seemed approaching, nay, had come.  We enjoyed
two days of it, then trouble settled down on us once more.

It began on Friday afternoon.  Mrs. Packard and I had been out
making some arrangements for the projected dinner-party and I had
stopped for a minute in the library before going up-stairs.

A pile of mail lay on the table.  Running this over with a rapid
hand, she singled out several letters which she began to open.
Their contents seemed far from satisfactory.  Exclamation after
exclamation left her lips, her agitation increasing with each one
she read, and her haste, too, till finally it seemed sufficient for
her just to glance at the unfolded sheet before letting it drop.
When the last one had left her hand, she turned and, encountering
my anxious look, bitterly remarked:

"We need not have made those arrangements this morning.  Seven
regrets in this mail and two in the early one.  Nine regrets in
all!  and I sent out only ten invitations.  What is the meaning of
it?  I begin to feel myself ostracized."

I did not understand it any more than she did.

"Invite others," I suggested, and was sorry for my presumption the
next minute.

Her poor lip trembled.

"I do not dare," she whispered.  "Oh, what will Mr. Packard say!
Some one or something is working against us.  We have enemies--
enemies, and Mr. Packard will never get his election."

Her trouble was natural and so was her expression of it.  Feeling
for her, and all the more that the cause of this concerted action
against her was as much a mystery to me as it was to herself, I
made some attempt to comfort her, which was futile enough, God
knows.  She heard my voice, no doubt, but she gave no evidence of
noting what I said.  When I had finished--that is, when she no
longer heard me speaking--she let her head droop and presently I
heard her murmur:

"It seems to me that if for any reason he fails to get his election
I shall wish to die."

She was in this state of dejection, with the echo of this sad
sentence in both our ears, when a light tap at the door was
followed by the entrance of Letty, the nurse-maid.  She wore an
unusual look of embarrassment and held something crushed in her
hand.  Mrs. Packard advanced hurriedly to meet her.

"What is it?" she interrogated sharply, like one expectant of evil
tidings.

"Nothing!  that is, not much," stammered the frightened girl,
attempting to thrust her hand behind her back.

But Mrs. Packard was too quick for her.

"You have something there!  What is it?  Let me see."

The girl's hand moved forward reluctantly.  "A paper which I found
pinned to the baby's coat when I took her out of the carriage," she
faltered.  "I--I don't know what it means."

Mrs. Packard's eyes opened wide with horror.  She seized the paper
and staggered with it to one of the windows.  While she looked at
it, I cast a glance at Letty.  She was crying, from what looked
like pure fear; but it was the fear of ignorance rather than
duplicity; she appeared as much mystified as ourselves.

Meanwhile I felt, rather than saw, the old shadow settling fast
upon the head of her who an hour before had been so bright.  She
had chosen a place where her form could not fail of being more or
less concealed by the curtain, and though I heard the paper rattle
I could not see it or the hand which held it.  But the time she
spent over it seemed interminable before I heard her utter a sharp
cry and saw the curtains shake as she clutched them.

It seemed the proper moment to proffer help, but before either
Letty or I could start forward, her command rang out in smothered
but peremptory tones:

"Keep back!  I want no one here!" and we stopped, each looking at
the other in very natural consternation.  And when, after another
seemingly interminable interval, she finally stepped forth, I noted
a haggard change in her face, and that her coat had been torn open
and even the front of her dress wrenched apart as if she felt
herself suffocating, or as if--but this alternative only suggested
itself to me later and I shall refrain from mentioning it now.

Crossing the floor with a stumbling step, with the paper which had
roused all this indignation still in her hand, she paused before
the now seriously alarmed Letty, and demanded in great excitement:

"Who pinned that paper on my child?  You know; you saw it done.
Was it a man or--"

"Oh no, ma'am, no, ma'am," protested the girl.  "No man came near
her.  It was a woman--a nice-looking woman."

"A woman!"

Mrs. Packard's tone was incredulous.  But the girl insisted.

"Yes, ma'am; there was no man there at all.  I was on one of the
park benches resting, with the baby in my arms, and this woman
passed by and saw us.  She smiled at the baby's ways, and then
stopped and took to talking about her,--how pretty she was and how
little afraid of strangers.  I saw no harm in the woman, ma'am, and
let her sit down on the same bench with me for a few minutes.  She
must have pinned the paper on the baby's coat then, for it was the
only time anybody was near enough to do it."

Mrs. Packard, with an irrepressible gesture of anger or dismay,
turned and walked back to the window.  The movement was a natural
one.  Certainly she was excusable for wishing to hide from the girl
the full extent of the agitation into which this misadventure had
thrown her.

"You may go."  The words came after a moment of silent suspense.
"Give the baby her supper--I know that you will never let any one
else come so near her again."

Letty probably did not catch the secret anguish hidden in her tone,
but I did, and after the nurse-maid was gone, I waited anxiously
for what Mrs. Packard would say.

It came from the window and conveyed nothing.  Would I do so and
so?  I forget what her requests were, only that they necessitated
my leaving the room.  There seemed no alternative but to obey, yet
I felt loath to leave her and was hesitating near the doorway when
a new interruption occurred.  Nixon brought in a telegram, and, as
Mrs. Packard advanced to take it, she threw on the table the slip
of paper which she had been poring over behind the curtains.

As I stepped back at Nixon's entrance I was near the table and the
single glance I gave this paper as it fell showed me that it was
covered with the same Hebrew-like characters of which I already
possessed more than one example. The surprise was acute, but the
opportunity which came with it was one I could not let slip.
Meeting her eye as the door closed on Nixon, I pointed at the
scrawl she had thrown down, and wonderingly asked her if that was
what Letty had found pinned to the baby's coat.

With a surprised start, she paused in her act of  opening the
telegram and made a motion as if to repossess herself of this, but
seeming to think better of it she confined herself to giving me a
sharp look.

"Yes," was her curt assent.

I summoned up all my courage, possibly all my powers of acting."

"Why, what is there in unreadable characters like these to alarm
you?"

She forgot her telegram, she forgot everything but that here was a
question she must answer in a way to disarm all suspicion.

"The fact," she accentuated gravely, "that they are unreadable.
What menace may they not contain?  I am afraid of them, as I am of
all obscure and mystifying things."

In a flash, at the utterance of these words, I saw, my way to the
fulfillment of the wish which had actuated me from the instant my
eyes had fallen on this paper.

"Do you think it a cipher?" I asked.

"A cipher?"

"I have always been good at puzzles.  I wish you would let me see
what I can make out of these rows of broken squares and topsy-turvy
angles.  Perhaps I can prove to you that they contain nothing to
alarm you."

The gleam of something almost ferocious sprang into this gentle
woman's eyes.  Her lips moved and I expected an angry denial, but
fear kept her back.  She did not dare to appear to understand this
paper any better than I did.  Besides, she was doubtless conscious
that its secret was not one to yield to any mere puzzle-reader.
She could safely trust it to my curiosity.  All this I detected in
her changing expression, before she made the slightest gesture
which allowed me to secure what I felt to be the most valuable
acquisition in the present exigency.

Then she turned to her telegram.  It was from her husband, and I
was not prepared for the cry of dismay which left her lips as she
read it, nor for the increased excitement into which she was thrown
by its few and seemingly simple words.

With apparent forgetfulness of what had just occurred--a
forgetfulness which insensibly carried her back to the moment when
she had given me some order which involved my departure from the
room--she impetuously called out over her shoulder which she had
turned on opening her telegram:

"Miss Saunders!  Miss Saunders!  are you there?  Bring me the
morning papers; bring me the morning papers!"

Instantly I remembered that we had not read the papers.  Contrary
to our usual habit we had gone about a pressing piece of work
without a glance at any of the three dailies laid to hand in their
usual place on the library table. "They are here on the table," I
replied, wondering as much at the hectic flush which now enlivened
her features as at the extreme paleness that had marked them the
moment before.

"Search them!  There is something new in them about me.  There must
be.  Read Mr. Packard's message."

I took it from her hand; only eight words in all.

Here they are--the marks of separation being mine:

 I am coming--libel I know--where is S.
                                      Henry.

"Search the columns," she repeated, as I laid the telegram down.
"Search!  Search!"

I hastily obeyed.  But it took me some time to find the paragraph
I sought.  The certainty that others in the house had read these
papers, if we had not, disturbed me.  I recalled certain glances
which I had seen pass between the servants behind Mrs. Packard's
back,--glances which I had barely noted at the time, but which
returned to my mind now with forceful meaning; and if these busy
girls had read, all the town had read--what?  Suddenly I found it.
She saw my eyes stop in their hurried scanning and my fingers
clutch the sheet more firmly, and, drawing up behind me, she
attempted to follow with her eyes the words I reluctantly read out.
Here they are, just as they left my trembling lips that day--words
that only the most rabid of opponents could have instigated:


 Apropos of the late disgraceful discoveries, by which a woman
 of apparent means and unsullied honor has been precipitated from
 her proud preeminence as a leader of fashion, how many women,
 known and admired to-day, could stand the test of such an inquiry
 as she was subjected to?  We know one at least, high in position
 and aiming at a higher, who, if the merciful veil were withdrawn
 which protects the secrets of the heart, would show such a dark
 spot in her life, that even the aegis of the greatest power in
 the state would be powerless to shield her from the indignation
 of those who now speak loudest in her praise.


"A lie!" burst in vehement protest from Mrs. Packard, as I
finished.  "A lie like the rest!  But oh, the shame of it! a shame
that will kill me." Then suddenly and with a kind of cold horror:
"It is this which has destroyed my social prestige in town.  I
understand those nine declinations now.  Henry!  my poor Henry!"

There was little comfort to offer, but I tried to divert her mind
to the practical aspect of the case by saying:

"What can Mr. Steele be doing?  He does not seem to be very
successful in his attempts to carry out the mayor's orders. See! your
husband asks where he is. He can mean no other by the words 'Where is
S--?' He knew that your mind would supply the name."

"Yes."

Her eyes had become fixed; her whole face betrayed a settled
despair.  Quickly, violently, she rang the bell.

Nixon appeared.

She advanced hurriedly to meet him.

"Nixon, you have Mr. Steele's address?"

"Yes, Mrs. Packard."

"Then go to it at once.  Find Mr. Steele if you can, but if that is
not possible, learn where he has gone and come right back and tell
me.  Mr. Packard telegraphs to know where he is.  He has not joined
the mayor in C---."

"Yes, Mrs. Packard; the house is not far.  I shall be back in
fifteen minutes."

The words were respectful, but the sly glint in his blinking eyes
as he hastened out fixed my thoughts again on this man and the
uncommon attitude he maintained toward the mistress whose behests
he nevertheless flew to obey.




CHAPTER XIX

THE CRY FROM THE STAIRS


I was alone in the library when Nixon returned.  He must have seen
Mrs. Packard go up before he left, for he passed by without
stopping, and the next moment I heard his foot on the stairs.

Some impulse made me step into the hall and cast a glance at his
ascending figure.  I could see only his back, but there was
something which I did not like in the curve of that back and the
slide of his hand as it moved along the stair-rail.

His was not an open nature at the best.  I almost forgot the
importance of his errand in watching the man himself.  Had he not
been a servant--but he was, and an old and foolishly fussy one.  I
would not imagine follies, only I wished I could follow him into
Mrs. Packard's presence.

His stay, however, was too short for much to have been gained
thereby.  Almost immediately he reappeared, shaking his head and
looking very much disturbed, and I was watching his pottering
descent when he was startled, and I was startled, by two cries
which rang out simultaneously from above, one of pain and distress
from the room he had just left, and one expressive of the utmost
glee from the lips of the baby whom the nursemaid was bringing down
from the upper hall.

Appalled by the anguish expressed in the mother's cry, I was
bounding up-stairs when my course was stopped by one of the most
poignant sights it has ever been my lot to witness.  Mrs. Packard
had heard her child's laugh, and flying from her room had met the
little one on the threshold of her door and now, crying and
sobbing, was kneeling with the child in her arms in the open space
at the top of the stairs.  Her paroxysm of grief, wild and
unconstrained as it was, gave less hint of madness than of
intolerable suffering.

Wondering at an abandonment which bespoke a grief too great for all
further concealment, I glanced again at Nixon.  He had paused in
the middle of the staircase and was looking back in a dubious way
denoting hesitation.  But as the full force of the tragic scene
above made itself felt in his slow mind, he showed a disposition to
escape and tremblingly continued his descent.  He was nearly upon
me when he caught my eye.  A glare awoke in his, and seeing his
right arm rise threateningly, I thought he would certainly strike
me.  But he slid by without doing so.

What did it mean?  Oh, what did it all mean?




CHAPTER XX

EXPLANATION


Determined to know the cause of Mrs. Packard's anguish, if not of
Nixon's unprovoked anger against myself, I caught him back as he
was passing me and peremptorily demanded:

"What message did you carry to Mrs. Packard to throw her into such
a state as this?  Answer!  I am in this house to protect her
against all such disturbances.  What did you tell her?"

"Nothing."

Sullenness itself in the tone.

"Nothing?  and you were sent on an errand?  Didn't you fulfil it?"

"Yes."

"And didn't tell her what you learned?"

"No."

"Why?"

"She didn't give me the chance."

"Oh!"

"I know it sounds queer, Miss, but it's true.  She didn't give me
a chance to talk."

He muttered the final sentence.  Indeed, all that we had said until
now had been in a subdued tone, but now my voice unconsciously
rose.

"You found Mr. Steele?"

"No, Miss, he was not at home."

"But they told you where to look for him?"

"No.  His landlady thinks he is dead.  He has queer spells, and
some one had sent her word about a man, handsome like him, who was
found dead at Hudson Three Corners last night.  Mr. Steele told her
he was going over to Hudson Three Corners.  She has sent to see if
the dead man is he."

"The dead man!"

Who spoke?  Not Mrs. Packard!  Surely that voice was another's.
Yet we both looked up to see:

The sight which met our eyes was astonishing, appalling.  She had
let her baby slip to the floor and had advanced to the stairs,
where she stood, clutching at the rail, looking down upon us, with
a joy in her face matching the unholy elation we could still hear
ringing in that word "dead."

Such a look might have leaped to life in the eyes of the Medusa
when she turned her beauty upon her foredoomed victims.

"Dead!" came again in ringing repetition from Mrs. Packard's lips,
every fiber in her tense form quivering and the gleam of hope
shining brighter and brighter in her countenance.  "No, not dead!"
Then while Nixon trembled and succumbed inwardly to this spectacle
of a gentle-hearted woman transformed by some secret and
overwhelming emotion into an image of vindictive delight, her hands
left the stair-rail and flew straight up over her head in the
transcendent gesture which only the greatest crises in life call
forth, and she exclaimed with awe-inspiring emphasis: "God could
not have been so merciful!"

It is not often, perhaps it is only once in a lifetime, that it is
given us to look straight into the innermost recesses of the human
soul.  Never before had such an opportunity come to me, and
possibly never would it come again, yet my first conscious impulse
was one of fright at the appalling self-revelation she had made,
not only in my hearing, but in that of nearly her whole household.
I could see, over her shoulders, Letty's eyes staring wide in
ingenuous dismay, while from the hall below rose the sound of
hurrying feet as the girls came running in from the kitchen.
Something must be done, and immediately, to recall her to herself,
and, if possible, to reinstate her in the eyes of her servants.

Bounding upward to where she still stood forgetful and
self-absorbed, I laid my hands softly but firmly on hers, which
had fallen back upon the rail, and quietly said:

"You have some very strong reason, I see, for looking upon Mr.
Steele as your husband's enemy rather than friend."

The appeal was timely.  With a start she woke to the realization of
her position and of the suggestive words she had just uttered, and
with a glance behind her at Letty and another at Nixon and the
maids, who by this time had pushed their way to the foot of the
stairs, she gathered herself up with a determination born of the
necessity of the moment and emphatically replied:

"No; I do not know Mr. Steele well enough for that.  My emotion at
the unexpected tidings of his possible death springs from another
cause." Here the help, the explanation for which she had been
searching, came. "Girls," she went on, addressing them with an
emphasis which drew all eyes, "I am ashamed to tell you what has so
deeply disturbed me these last few days.  I should blame any one of
you for being affected as I was.  The great love I bear my husband
and child is my excuse--a poor one, I know, but one you will
understand.  A week ago something happened to me in the library
which frightened me very much.  I saw--or thought I saw--what some
would call an apparition, but what you would call a ghost.  Don't
shriek!"  (The two girls behind me had begun to scream and make as
if to run away.)  "It was all imagination, of course--there can not
really be any such thing.  Ghosts in these days?  Pshaw!  But I was
very, nervous that night and could not help feeling that the mere
fact of my thinking of anything so dreadful meant misfortune to
some one in this house.  Wait!"  Her voice was imperious; and the
shivering, terrified girls, superstitious to the backbone, stopped
in spite of themselves.  "You must hear it all, and you, too, Miss
Saunders, who have only heard half.  I was badly frightened then,
especially as the ghost, spirit-man, or whatever it was, wore a
look, in the one short moment I stood face to face with it, full of
threat and warning.  Next day Mr. Packard introduced his new
secretary.  Girls, he had the face of the Something I had seen,
without the threatening look, which had so alarmed me."

"Bad 'cess to him!" rang in vigorous denunciation from the cook.
"Why didn't ye send him 'mejitly about his business?  It's trouble
he'll bring to us all and no mistake!"

"That was what I feared," assented her now thoroughly composed
mistress.  "So when Nixon said just now that Mr. Steele was dead,
had fallen in a fit at Hudson Three Corners or something like
that--I felt such wicked relief at finding that my experience had
not meant danger to ourselves, but to him--wicked, because it was
so selfish--that I forgot myself and cried out in the way you all
heard.  Blame me if you will, but don't frighten yourselves by
talking about it.  If Mr. Steele is indeed dead, we have enough to
trouble us without that."

And with a last glance at me, which ended in a wavering half-
deprecatory smile, she stepped back and passed into her own room.

The mood in which I proceeded to my own quarters was as thoughtful
as any I had ever experienced.




CHAPTER XXI

THE CIPHER


Hitherto I had mainly admired Mrs. Packard's person and the extreme
charm of manner which never deserted her, no matter how she felt.
Now I found myself compelled to admire the force and quality of
her mind, her readiness to meet emergencies and the tact with
which she had availed herself of the superstition latent in the
Irish temperament.  For I had no more faith in the explanation
she had seen fit to give these ignorant girls than I had in the
apparition itself.  Emotion such as she had shown called for a more
matter-of-fact basis than the one she had ascribed to it.  No unreal
and purely superstitious reason would account for the extreme joy
and self-abandonment with which she had hailed the possibility of
Mr. Steele's death.  The "no" she had given me when I asked if she
considered this man her husband's enemy had been a lying no.  To
her, for some cause as yet unexplained, the secretary was a
dangerous ally to the man she loved; an ally so near and so
dangerous that the mere rumor of his death was capable of lifting
her from the depths of despondency into a state of abnormal
exhilaration and hope.  Now why?  What reason had she for this
belief, and how was it in my power to solve the mystery which I
felt to be at the bottom of all the rest?

But one means suggested itself.  I was now assured that Mrs.
Packard would never take me into her actual confidence, any more
than she had taken her husband.  What I learned must be in spite of
her precautions.  The cipher of which I had several specimens
might, if properly read, give me the clue I sought.  I had a free
hour before me.  Why not employ it in an endeavor to pick out the
meaning of those odd Hebraic characters?  I had in a way received
her sanction to do so--if I could; and if I should succeed, what
shadows might it not clear from the path of the good man whose
interests it was my chief duty to consult?

Ciphers have always possessed a fascination for me.  This one, from
the variety of its symbols, offered a study of unusual interest.
Collecting the stray specimens which I had picked up, I sat down in
my cozy little room and laid them all out before me, with the
following result:

__________________________

[transcriber's note: the symbols cannot be converted to ASCII so I
have shown them as follows:]

[]  is a Square

[-] is sides and bottom of a square,

C   is top, bottom and left side of a square,

L   is left side and bottom of a square,,

V   is two lines forming a V shape

  appearing before a symbol should be inside the symbol

)   appearing before a symbol means the mirror image of that symbol

^   appearing before a symbol means the inverted symbol

?   is a curve inside the symbol

all other preceding symbols are my best approximation for shapes
shown inside that symbol.

; is used to separate each symbol
__________________________


1. []; V; []; .>; V; [-]; <;

2. []; V; []; .>; V; [-]; <; L; ).L; <; )7; .7;

3. []; V; []; .>; V; [-]; <; ).L; .C;[]; .L; >; ,C; []; .<; ^[-];
^[-]; .<;

4. []; V; []; .>; V; [-]; <; <; L; >; ^V; L; V; []; )L; ^V; [-];
[]; V; ).C; ^[-]; >; )C; ),C; V; <; C; ^V; ^[-]; .>; [-]; <;

5. *>; []; V; []; *V; []; ~7; )C; .>; ^[o]; )L; ^V; []; Lo; ^V; )C;
)7*; V; )C?; L; )L; 7; .>; .^[-]; )L; >; <; :[-], [-]; Lo; .<; ?[-
]; )7; [-]; )C; []; .C; [-]; *7; L; .7; ^V; )o7; *>; C; ^V; .C; .<;
[-]; []; 7; .C; )L; :7; [-]; )*L; C; ^V; .L; .>; ^[%]; C; 7; *L; 7;
):L; )7; ^.V; []; [-]; .L;[-]


No. 1: My copy of the characters, as I remember seeing them on the
envelope which Mrs. Packard had offered to Mr. Steele and afterward
thrown into the fire.

Nos. 2, 3 and 4: The discarded scraps I had taken from the waste-
basket in her room.

No. 5: The lengthy communication in another hand, which Mrs.
Packard had found pinned on the baby's cloak, and at my
intercession had handed over to me.

A goodly array, if the latter was a specimen of the same cipher as
the first, a fact which its general appearance seemed to establish,
notwithstanding the few added complexities observable in it, and
one which a remembrance of her extreme agitation on opening it
would have settled in my mind, even if these complexities had been
greater and the differences even more pronounced than they were.
Lines entirely unsuggestive of meaning to her might have aroused
her wonder and possibly her anger, but not her fear; and the
emotion which I chiefly observed in her at that moment had been
fear.

So! out of these one hundred and fifty characters, many of them
mere repetitions, it remained for me to discover a key whereby
their meaning might be rendered intelligible.

To begin, then, what peculiarities were first observable in them?

Several.

First: The symbols followed one after the other without breaks,
whether the communication was limited to one word or to many.

Second: Nos. 2, 3 and 4 started with the identical characters which
made up No. 1.

Third: While certain lines in Nos. 2, 3 and 4 were heavier than
others, no such distinction was observable in the characters
forming No. 1.

Fourth: This distinction was even more marked in the longer
specimen written by another hand, viz.: No. 5.

Fifth: This distinction, which we will call shading, occurred
intermittently, sometimes in two consecutive characters, but never
in three.

Sixth: This shading was to be seen now on one limb of the character
it apparently emphasized and now on another.

Seventh: In the three specimens of the seven similar characters
commencing Nos. 2, 3 and 4, the exact part shaded was not always the
same as for instance, it was the left arm of the second character
in No. 2 which showed the heavy line, while the shading was on the
right-hand arm of the corresponding character in No. 3.

Eighth: These variations of emphasis in No. 4 coincided sometimes
with those seen in No. 2 and again with those in No. 3.

Ninth: Each one of these specimens, saving the first, ended in a
shaded character.

Tenth: While some of the characters were squares or parts of a
square, others were in the shape of a Y turned now this way and now
that.

Eleventh: These characters were varied by the introduction of dots,
and, in some cases, by the insertion of minute sketches of animals,
birds, arrows, signs of the zodiac, etc., with here and there one
of a humorous, possibly sarcastic, nature.

Twelfth: Dots and dots only were to be found in the specimen
emanating from Mrs. Packard's hand; birds, arrows, skipping boys
and hanging men, etc., being confined to No. 5, the product of
another brain and hand, at present unknown.

Now what conclusions could I draw from these?  I shall give them to
you as they came to me that night.  Others with wits superior to my
own may draw additional and more suggestive ones:

First: Division into words was not considered necessary or was made
in some other way than by breaks.

Second: The fact of the shading being omitted from No. 1 meant
nothing--that specimen being my own memory of lines, the shading or
non-shading of which would hardly have attracted my attention.

Third: The similarity observable in the seven opening characters of
the first four specimens being taken as a proof of their standing
for the same word or phrase, it was safe to consider this word or
phrase as a complete one to which she had tried to fit others, and
always to her dissatisfaction, till she had finally rejected all
but the simple one with which she had started.

Fourth: No. 1, short as it was, was, therefore, a communication in
itself.

Fifth: The shading of a character was in some way essential to its
proper understanding, but not the exact place where that shading
fell.

Sixth: The dots were necessarily modifications, but not their shape
or nature.

Seventh: This shading might indicate the end of a word.

Eighth: If so, the shading of two contiguous characters would show
the first one to be a word of one letter.  There are but two words
in the English language of one letter--a and i--and in the
specimens before me but one character, that of [], which shows
shading, next to another shaded character.

Ninth: [] was therefore a or i

A decided start.

All this, of course, was simply preliminary.

The real task still lay before me.  It was to solve the meaning of
those first seven characters, which, if my theory were correct, was
a communication in itself, and one of such importance that, once
mastered, it would give the key to the whole situation.

[]; V; []; .>; V; [-]; <;

or with the shading (same in bold - transcriber)

[]; V; []; .>; V; [-]; <;

You have all read The Gold Bug, and know something of the method by
which a solution is obtained by that simplest of all ciphers, where
a fixed character takes the place of each letter in the alphabet.

Let us see if it applies to this one.

There are twenty-six letters in the English alphabet.  Are there
twenty-six or nearly twenty-six different characters, in the one
hundred and one I find inscribed on the various slips spread out
before me?

No, there are but fourteen.  A check to begin with.

But wait; the dots make a difference.  Let us increase the list by
assuming that angles or squares thus marked are different letters
from those of the same shape in which no dots or sketches occur,
and we bring the list up to twenty.  That is better.

The dotted or otherwise marked squares or angles are separate
characters.

Now, which one of these appears most frequently?  The square, which
we have already decided must be either a or i.  In the one short
word or phrase we are at present considering, it occurs twice.  Now
supposing that this square stands for a, which according to Poe's
theory it should, a coming before s in the frequency in which it
occurs in ordinary English sentences, how would the phrase look
(still according to Poe) with dashes taking the place of the
remaining unknown letters?

Thus

A-a ---- if the whole is a single word.

A- a-  -- if the whole is a phrase.  That it was a phrase I was
convinced, possibly because one clings to so neat a theory as the
one which makes the shading, so marked a feature in all the
specimens before us, the sign of division into words. Let us take
these seven characters as a phrase then and not as a word.  What
follows?

The dashes following the two a's stand for letters, each of which
should make a word when joined to a.  What are these letters?  Run
over the alphabet and see.  The only letters making sense when
joined with a are h, m, n, s, t or x.  Discarding the first and the
last, we have these four words, am, an, as, at.  Is it possible to
start any intelligible phrase with any two of these arranged in any
conceivable way?  No.  Then [] can not stand for a.  Let us see if
it does for i.  The words of two letters headed by i we find to be
if, in, is and it.  A more promising collection than the first.
One could easily start a phrase with any of these, even with any
two of them such as If it, Is in, Is it, It is. [] is then the
symbol of i, and some one of the above named combinations forms the
beginning of the short phrase ending with a word of three letters
symbolized by V [-] .<

What word?

If my reasoning is correct up to this point, it should not be hard
to determine.

First, one of these three symbols, the V, is a repetition of one of
those we have already shown to be s, t, f, or n.  Of the remaining
two, [-] <, one must be a vowel, that is, it must be either u, e,
o, u, or y; i being already determined upon.  Now how many [-]'s
and <'s do we find in the collection before us?  Ten or more of the
first, and six, or about six, of the latter.  Recalling the table
made out by Poe--a table I once learned as a necessary part of my
schooling as a cipher interpreter--I ran over it thus: e is the one
letter most in use in English.  Afterward the succession runs thus
a, o, i d, h, n, r, etc.  There being then ten [-]'s to six <'s [-]
must be a vowel, and in all probability the vowel e, as no other
character in the whole collection, save the plentiful squares, is
repeated so often.

I am a patient woman usually, but I was nervous that night, and,
perhaps, too deeply interested in the outcome to do myself justice.
I could think of no word with a for one of its three letters which
would make sense when added on to It is, Is it, I f it, Is in.

Conscious of no mistake, yet always alive to the possibility of
one, I dropped the isolated scrap I was working upon and took up
the longer and fuller ones, and with them a fresh line of
reasoning.  If my argument so far had been trustworthy, I should
find, in these other specimens, a double [-][-] standing for the
double e so frequently found in English.  Did I find such?  No.
Another shock to my theory.

Should I, then, give it up?  Not while another means of verification
remained.  The word the should occur more than once in a collection
of words as long as the one before me.  If U is really e, I should
find it at the end of the supposed thes.  Do I so find it?  There are
several words scattered through the whole, of only three letters.
Are any of them terminated by U?  Not one.  My theory is false, then,
and I must begin all over.

Discarding every previous conclusion save this, that the shading of
a line designated the termination of a word, I hunted first for the
thes.  Making a list of the words containing only three letters, I
was confronted by the following:

     V   [-]   <

     )L   )C   C

     <    L    >

     ^V   L    V

     <    C   ^V

    .>  .[-]) )L

    .V   ).C   L.

    .<  .[-]  )7

     ^V   C    7

     )L  .L    >


No two alike.  Astonishing!  Thirty-two words of English and only
one the in the whole?  Could it be that the cipher was in a foreign
language?  The preponderance of i's so out of proportion to the
other vowels had already given me this fear, but the lack of thes
seemed positively to indicate it.  Yet I must dig deeper before
accepting defeat.

Th is a combination of letters which Poe says occurs so often in
our language that they can easily be picked out in a cipher of this
length.  How many times can a conjunction of two similar characters
be found in the lines before us. .> .[-] occurs three times, which
is often enough, perhaps, to establish the fact that they stand for
th.  Do I find them joined with a third character in the list of
possible thes?  Yes. .> [-] which would seem to fix both the th and
the e.

But I have grown wary and must make myself sure.  Do I find a word
in which this combination of. > .[-] occurs twice, as sometimes
happens with the th we are considering?  No, but I find two other
instances in which like contiguous symbols do appear twice in one
word; the .< .[-] in No. 3 and the .V .)C  in No. 4--a discovery the
most embarrassing of all, since in both cases the symbols which
begin the word are reversed at its end, as witness: .V .)C - - - )C
V -- .< .[-] - - - .[-] .<.  For, if .V )C stands for th, and the
whole word showed in letters th- - -ht, which to any eye suggests
the word thought, what does .< .[-] stand for, concerning which the
same conditions are observable?

I could not answer.  I had run on a snag.

Rules which applied to one part of the cipher failed in another.
Could it be that a key was necessary to its proper solution?  I
began to think so, and, moreover, that Mrs. Packard had made use of
some such help as I watched her puzzling in the window over these
symbols.  I recalled her movements, the length of time which
elapsed before the cry of miserable understanding escaped her lips,
the fact that her dress was torn apart at the throat when she came
out, and decided that she had not only drawn some paper from her
bosom helpful to the elucidation of these symbols, but that this
paper was the one which had been the object of her frantic search
the night I watched her shadow on the wall.

So convinced was I by these thoughts that any further attempt to
solve the cryptogram without such aid as I have mentioned would end
by leaving me where I was at present,--that is, in the fog,--that
I allowed the lateness of the hour to influence me; and, putting
aside my papers, I went to bed. If I had sat over them another
hour, should I have been more fortunate?  Make the attempt yourself
and see.




CHAPTER XXII

MERCY


"Where is my wife?"

"Sleeping, sir, after a day of exhausting emotion."

"She didn't wire me?"

"No, sir."

"Perhaps she wasn't able?"

"She was not, Mayor Packard."

"I must see her.  I came as soon as I could.  Left Warner to fill
my place on the platform, and it is the night of nights, too.  Why,
what's the matter?"

He had caught me staring over his shoulder at the form drawn up in
the doorway.

"Nothing; I thought you had come alone."

"No, Mr. Steele is with me.  He joined me at noon, just after I had
telegraphed home.  He has come back to finish the work I assigned
him.  He has at last discovered--or thinks he has--the real author
of those libels.  You have something special to say to me?" he
whispered, as I followed him upstairs.

"Yes, and I think, if I were you, that I should say nothing to Mrs.
Packard about Mr. Steele's having returned."  And I rapidly
detailed the occurrence of the afternoon, ending with Mrs.
Packard's explanation to her servants.

The mayor showed impatience. "Oh, I can not bother with such
nonsense as that," he declared; "the situation is too serious."

I thought so, too, when in another moment his wife's door opened
and she stepped out upon the landing to meet him.  Her eyes fell on
Mr. Steele, standing at the foot of the stairs, before they
encountered her husband; and though she uttered no cry and hardly
paused in her approach toward the mayor, I saw the heart within her
die as suddenly and surely as the flame goes out in a gust of
wind.

"You!"  There was hysteria in the cry.  Pray God that the wild note
in it was not that of incipient insanity!  "How good of you to give
up making your great speech to-night, just to see how I have borne
this last outrage!  You do see, don't you?"  Here she drew her form
to its full height.  "My husband believes in me, and it gives me
courage to face the whole world.  Ah! is that Mr. Steele I see
below there?  Pardon me, Mr. Steele, if I show surprise.  We heard
a false report of your illness this afternoon.  Henry, hadn't Mr.
Steele better come up-stairs?   I presume you are here to talk over
this last dreadful paragraph with me."

"It is not necessary for Mr. Steele to join us if you do not wish
him to," I heard the mayor whisper in his wife's ear.

"Oh, I do not mind," she returned with an indifference whose
reality I probably gauged more accurately than he did.

"That is good."  And he called Mr. Steele up.  "You see she is
reasonable enough," he muttered in my ear as he motioned me to
follow them into the up-stairs sitting-room to which she had led
the way.  "The more heads the better in a discussion of this kind,"
was the excuse he gave his wife and Mr. Steele as he ushered me in.

As neither answered, I considered my presence accepted and sat down
in as remote a corner as offered.  Verily the fates were active in
my behalf.

Mayor Packard was about to close the door, when Mrs. Packard
suddenly leaped by him with the cry:

"There's the baby!  She must have heard your voice."  And rushing
into the hall she came back with the child whom she immediately
placed in its father's arms.  Then she slowly seated herself.  Not
until she had done so did she turn to Mr. Steele.

"Sit," said she, with a look and gesture her husband would have
marveled at had he not been momentarily occupied with the prattling
child.

The secretary bowed and complied.  Surely men of such great
personal attractions are few.  Instantly the light, shaded though
it seemingly was in all directions, settled on his face, making
him, to my astonished gaze, the leading personality in the group.
Was this on account of the distinction inherent in extreme beauty
or because of a new and dominating expression which had
insensibly crept into his features?

The mayor, and the mayor only, seemed oblivious to the fact.
Glancing up from the child, he opened the conference by saying:
"Tell Mrs. Packard, Steele, what you have just told me."

With a quiet shifting of his figure which brought him into a better
line with the woman he was asked to address, the secretary opened
his lips to reply when she, starting, reached out one hand and drew
toward herself the little innocent figure of her child, which she
at once placed between herself and him.  Seeing this, I recalled
the scraps of cipher left in my room above and wished I had
succeeded in determining their meaning, if only to understand the
present enigmatical situation.

Meanwhile Mr. Steele was saying in the mellow tone of a man
accustomed to tune his voice to suit all occasions: "Mrs. Packard
will excuse me if I seem abrupt.  In obedience to commands laid
upon me by his Honor, I spent both Tuesday and Wednesday in
inquiries as to the origin of the offensive paragraph which
appeared in Monday's issue of the Leader.  Names were given me, but
too many of them.  It took me two days to sift these down to one,
and when I had succeeded in doing this, it was only to find that
the man I sought was ninety miles away.  Madam, I journeyed those
ninety miles to learn that meanwhile he had returned to this city.
While I was covering those miles for the second time, to-day's
paragraph appeared.  I hastened to accuse its author of libel, but
the result was hardly what I expected.  Perhaps you know what he
said."

"No," she harshly returned, "I do not."  And with the instinctive
gesture of one awaiting attack she raised her now sleepy and
nodding child in front of her laboring breast, with a look in her
eyes which I see yet.

"He said--pardon me, your Honor, pardon me,  Madam--that I was at
liberty to point out what was false in it."

With a leap she was on her feet, towering above us all in her
indignation and overpowering revolt against the man who was the
conscious instrument of this insult.  The child, loosened so
suddenly from her arms, tottered and would have fallen, had not Mr.
Steele leaned forward and drawn the little one across to himself.
Mr. Packard, who, we must remember, had been more or less prepared
for what his secretary had to say, cast a glance at his wife,
teeming with varied emotions.

"And what did you reply to that?" were the words she hurled at the
unabashed secretary.

"Nothing," was his grave reply.  "I did not know myself what was
false in it."

With sudden faltering, Mrs. Packard reseated herself, while the
mayor, outraged by what was evidently a very unexpected answer,
leaned forward in great anger, crying:

"That was not the account you gave me of this wretched interview.
Explain yourself, Mr. Steele.  Don't you see that your silence at
such a moment, to say nothing of the attitude you at present
assume, is an insult to Mrs. Packard?"

The smile he met in reply was deprecatory enough; so were the
words his outburst had called forth.

"I did not mean, and do not mean to insult Mrs. Packard.  I am
merely showing you how hampered a man is, whatever his feelings,
when it comes to a question of facts known only to a lady with whom
he has not exchanged fifty words since he came into her house.  If
Mrs. Packard will be good enough to inform me just how much and how
little is true in the paragraph we are considering, I shall see
this rascally reporter again and give him a better answer."

Mayor Packard looked unappeased.  This was not the way to soothe a
woman whom he believed to be greatly maligned.  With an exclamation
indicative of his feelings, he was about to address some hasty
words to the composed, almost smiling, man who confronted him, when
Mrs. Packard herself spoke with unexpected self-control, if not
disdain.

"You are a very honest man, Mr. Steele.  I commend the nicety of
your scruples and am quite ready to trust myself to them.  I own to
no blot, in my past or present life, calling for public
arraignment.  If my statement of the fact is not enough, I here
swear on the head of my child--"

"No, no," he quickly interpolated, "don't frighten the baby.
Swearing is not necessary; I am bound to believe your word, Mrs.
Packard."  And lifting a sheet of paper from a pile lying on the
table before him, he took a pencil from his pocket and began making
lines to amuse the child dancing on his knee.

Mrs. Packard's eyes opened in wonder mingled with some emotion
deeper than distaste, but she said nothing, only watched in a
fascinated way his moving fingers. The mayor, mollified possibly by
his secretary's last words, sank back again in his chair with the
remark:

"You have heard Mrs. Packard's distinct denial.  You are
consequently armed for battle.  See that you fight well.  It is all
a part of the scheme to break me up.  One more paragraph of that
kind and I shall be a wreck, even if my campaign is not."

"There will not be any more."

"Ah! you can assure me of that?"

"Positively."

"What are you playing there?" It was Mrs. Packard who spoke.  She
was pointing at the scribble he was making on the paper.

"Tit-tat-to," he smiled, "to amuse the baby."

Did she hate to see him so occupied, or was her own restlessness of
a nature demanding a like outlet?  Tearing her eyes away from him
and the child, she looked about her in a wild way, till she came
upon a box of matches standing on the large center-table around
which they were all grouped.  Taking some in her hand, she
commenced to lay them out on the table before her, possibly in an
attempt to attract the baby's attention to herself.  Puerile
business, but it struck me forcibly, possibly from the effect it
appeared to have upon the mayor.  Looking from one to the other in
an astonishment which was not without its hint of some new and
overmastering feeling on his own part, he remarked:

"Isn't it time for the baby to go to bed?  Surely, our talk is too
serious to be interrupted by games to please a child."

Without a word Mr. Steele rose and put the protesting child in the
mother's arms.  She, rising, carried it to the door, and, coming
slowly back, reseated herself before the table and began to push
the matches about again with fingers that trembled beyond her
control.  The mayor proceeded as if no time had elapsed since his
last words.

"You had some words then with this Brainard--I think you called him
Brainard--exacted some promise from him?"

"Yes, your Honor," was the only reply.

Did not Mrs. Packard speak, too?  We all seemed to think so, for we
turned toward her; but she gave no evidence of having said
anything, though an increased nervousness was visible in her
fingers as she pushed the matches about.

"I thought I was warranted in doing so much," continued Mr. Steele.
"I could not buy the man with money, so I used threats."

"Right! anything to squelch him," exclaimed the mayor, but not with
the vigor I expected from him.  Some doubt, some dread--caught
perhaps from his wife's attitude or expression--seemed to interpose
between his indignation and the object of it.  "You are our good
friend, Steele, in spite of the shock you gave us a moment ago."

As no answer was made to this beyond a smile too subtle and too
fine to be understood by his openhearted chief, the mayor proceeded
to declare:

"Then that matter is at an end.  I pray that it may have done us no
real harm.  I do not think it has.  People resent attacks on women,
especially, on one whose reputation has never known a shadow, as
girl, wife, or mother."

"Yes," came in slow assent from the lips which had just smiled, and
he glanced at Mrs. Packard whose own lips seemed suddenly to become
dry, for I saw her try to moisten them as her right hand groped
about for something on the tabletop and finally settled on a small
paper-weight which she set down amongst her matches.  Was it then
or afterward that I began to have my first real doubt whether some
shadow had not fallen across her apparently unsullied life?

"Yes, you are right," repeated Mr. Steele more energetically.
"People do resent such insinuations against a woman, though I
remember one case where the opposite effect was produced.  It was
when Collins ran for supervisor in Cleveland.  He was a good fellow
himself, and he had a wife who was all that was beautiful and
charming, but who had once risked her reputation in an act which
did call for public arraignment.  Unfortunately, there was a man
who knew of this act and he published it right and left and--"

"Olympia!" Mayor Packard was on his feet, pointing in sudden fury
and suspicion at the table where the matches lay about in odd and,
as I now saw, seemingly set figures.  "You are doing something
besides playing with those matches.  I know Mr. Steele's famous
cipher; he showed it to me a week ago; and so, evidently, do you,
in spite of the fact that you have had barely fifty words with him
since he came to the house.  Let me read--ah!--give over that piece
of paper you have there, Steele, if you would not have me think you
as great a dastard as we know that Brainard to be!"

And while his wife drooped before his eyes and a cynical smile
crept about the secretary's fine mouth, he caught up the sheet on
which Steele had been playing tit-tat-to with the child, and
glanced from the table to it and back again to the table on which
the matches lay in the following device, the paper-weight answering
for the dot:

7; L; .)7; [-]; ^V

"M," suddenly left the mayor's writhing lips; then slowly, letter
by letter, "E-R-C-Y.  Mercy!" he vociferated.  "Why does my wife
appeal for mercy to you--a stranger--and in your own cipher!
Miserable woman!  What secret's here?  Either you are--"

"Hush!  some one's at the door!" admonished the secretary.

Mr. Packard turned quickly, and, smoothing his face rapidly, as
such men must, started for the door.  Mrs. Packard, flinging her
whole soul into a look, met the secretary's eyes for a moment and
then let her head sink forward on her hands above those telltale
matches, from whose arrangement she had reaped despair in place of
hope.

Mr. Steele smiled again, his fine, false smile, but after her head
had fallen; not before.  Indeed, he had vouchsafed no reply to her
eloquent look.  It was as if it had met marble till her eyes were
bidden; then--

But Nixon was in the open doorway and Nixon was speaking:

"A telegram, your Honor."

The old man spoke briskly, even a little crisply--perhaps he always
did when he addressed the mayor.  But his eyes roamed eagerly and
changed to a burning, red color when they fell upon the dejected
figure of his mistress.  I fancied that, had he dared, he would
have leaped into the room and taken his own part--and who could
rightly gage what that was?--in the scene which may have been far
more comprehensive to him than to me.  But he did not dare, and my
eyes passed from him to the mayor.

"From Haines," that gentleman announced, forgetting the suggestive
discovery he had just made in the great and absorbing interest of
his campaign.  "'Speech good--great applause becoming thunderous at
flash of your picture.  All right so far if--'" he read out,
ceasing abruptly at the "if" which, as I afterward understood,
really ended the message.  "No answer," he explained to Nixon as he
hurriedly, dismissed him.  "That 'if' concerns you," he now
declared, coming back to his wife and to his troubles at the same
instant.  "Explain the mystery which seems likely to undo me.  Why
do you sit there bowed under my accusations?  Why should Henry
Packard's wife cry for mercy, to any man?  Because those damnable
accusations are true?  Because you have a secret in your past and
this man knows it?"

Slowly she rose, slowly she met his eyes, and even he started back
at her pallor and the drawn misery in her face.  But she did not
speak.  Instead of that she simply reached out and laid her hand on
Mr. Steele's arm, drooping almost to the ground as she did so.
"Mercy!" she suddenly wailed, but this time to the man who had so
relentlessly accused her. The effect was appalling.  The mayor
reeled, then sprang forward with his hand outstretched for his
secretary's throat.  But his words were for his wife. "What does
this mean?  Why do you take your stand by the side of another man
than myself?  What have I done or what have you done that I should
live to face such an abomination as this?"

It was Steele who answered, with a lift of his head as full of
assertion as it was of triumph.

"You? nothing; she? everything.  You do not know this woman,
Mayor Packard; for instance, you do not know her name."

"Not know her name?  My wife's?"

"Not in the least.  This lady's name is Brainard.  So is mine.
Though she has lived with you several years in ignorance of my
continued existence, no doubt, she is my wife and not yours.  We
were married in Boone, Minnesota, six years ago."




CHAPTER XXIII

THE WIFE'S TALE


Ten minutes later this woman was pleading her cause.  She had left
the side of the man who had just assumed the greatest of all rights
over her and was standing in a frenzy of appeal before him she
loved so deeply and yet had apparently wronged.

Mayor Packard was sitting with his head in his hands in the chair
into which he had dropped when the blow fell which laid waste his
home, his life, the future of his child and possibly the career
which was as much, perhaps more, to him than all these.  He had not
uttered a word since that dreadful moment.  To all appearance her
moans of contrition fell upon deaf ears, and she had reached the
crisis of her misery without knowing the extent of the condemnation
hidden in his persistent silence.  Collapse seemed inevitable, but
I did not know the woman or the really wonderful grip she held on
herself.  Seeing that he was moved by nothing she had said, she
suddenly paused, and presently I heard her observe in quite a
different tone:

"There is one thing you must know--which I thought you would know
without my telling you.  I have never lived with this man, and I
believed him dead when I gave my hand to you."

The mayor's fingers twitched.  She had touched him at last.
"Speak!  tell me," he murmured hoarsely.  "I do not want to do you
any injustice."

"I shall have to begin far, far back; tell about my early life and
all its temptations," she faltered, "or you will never understand."

"Speak."

Sensible at this point of the extreme impropriety of my presence,
I rose, with an apology, to leave.  But she shook her head quickly,
determinedly, saying that as I had heard so much I must hear more.
Then she went on with her story.

"I have committed a great fault," said she, "but one not so deep or
inexcusable as now appears, whatever that man may say," she added
with a slow turn toward the silent secretary.

Did she expect to provoke a reply from the man who, after the first
triumphant assertion of his claim, had held himself as removed from
her and as unresponsive to her anguish as had he whom she directly
addressed?  If so, she must have found her disappointment bitter,
for he did not respond with so much as a look.  He may have smiled,
but if so, it was not a helpful smile; for she turned away with a
shudder and henceforth faced and addressed the mayor only.

"My mother married against the wishes of all her family and they
never forgave her.  My father died early--he had never got on in
the world--and before I was fifteen I became the sole support of my
invalid mother as well as of myself.  We lived in Boone, Minnesota.

"You can imagine what sort of support it was, as I had no special
talent, no training and only the opportunity given by a crude
western town of two or three hundred inhabitants.  I washed dishes
in the hotel kitchen--I who had a millionaire uncle in Detroit and
had been fed on tales of wealth and culture by a mother who
remembered her own youth and was too ignorant of my real nature to
see the harm she was doing.  I washed dishes and ate my own heart
out in shame and longing--bitter shame and frenzied longing, which
you must rate at their full force if you would know my story and
how I became linked to this man.

"I was sixteen when we first met.  He was not then what he is now,
but he was handsome enough to create an excitement in town and to
lift the girl he singled out into an enviable prominence.
Unfortunately, I was that girl.  I say unfortunately, because his
good looks failed to arouse in me more than a passing admiration;
and in accepting his attentions, I consulted my necessities and
pride rather than the instincts of my better nature.  When he asked
me to marry him I recoiled.  I did not know why then, nor did I
know why later; but know why now.  However, I let this premonition
pass and engaged myself to him, and the one happy moment I knew was
when I told my mother what I had done, and saw her joy and heard
the hope with which she impulsively cried: 'It is something I can
write your uncle.  Who knows?  Perhaps he may forgive me my
marriage when he hears that my child is going to do so well!'  Poor
mother!  she had felt the glamour of my lover's good looks and
cleverness much more than I had.  She saw from indications to which
I was blind that I was going to marry a man of mark, and was much
more interested in the possible reply she might receive to the
letter with which she had broken the silence of years between
herself and her family than in the marriage itself.

"But days passed, a week, and no answer came.  My uncle--the only
relative remaining in which we could hope to awaken any interest,
or rather, the only one whose interest would be worth awakening, he
being a millionaire and unmarried--declined, it appeared, any
communication with one so entirely removed from his sympathies; and
the disappointment of it broke my mother's heart.  Before my
wedding-day came she was lying in the bare cemetery I had passed so
often with a cold dread in my young and bounding heart.

"With her loss the one true and unselfish bond which held me to my
lover was severed, and, unknown to him--(perhaps he hears it now
for the first time)--I had many hours of secret hesitation which
might have ended in a positive refusal to marry him if I had not
been afraid of his anger and the consequences of an open break.
With all his protestations of affection and the very ardent love he
made me, he had not succeeded in rousing my affections, but he had
my fears.  I knew that to tell him to his face I would not marry
him would mean death to him and possibly to myself.  Such
intuition, young as I was, did I have of his character, though I
comprehended so little the real range of his mind and the
unswerving trend of his ambitious nature.

"So my, wedding-day came and we were united in the very hotel
where I had so long served in a menial capacity.  The social
distinctions in such a place being small and my birth and breeding
really placing me on a par with my employer and his family, I was
given the parlor for this celebration and never, never, shall I
forget its mean and bare look, even to my untutored eyes; or how
lonely those far hills looked, through the small-paned window I
faced; or what a shadow seemed to fall across them as the parson
uttered those fateful words, so terrible to one whose heart is not
in them: What God hath joined together let no man put asunder.
Death and not life awaited me on that bleak hillside, or so I
thought, though the bridegroom at my side was the handsomest man I
had ever seen and had rather exceeded than failed in his devotion
to me as a lover.

"The ceremony over, I went up-stairs to make my final preparations
for departure.  No bridesmaids or real friends had lent joy to the
occasion; and when I closed that parlor door upon my bridegroom and
the two or three neighbors and boon companions with whom he was
making merry, I found myself alone with my dead heart and a most
unwelcome future.  I remember, as the lock clicked and the rude
hall, ruder even than the wretched half-furnished room I had just
left, opened before me, a sensation of terror at leaving even this
homely refuge and a half-formed wish that I was going back to my
dish-washing in the kitchen.  It was therefore with a shock, which
makes my brain reel yet, that I saw, lying on a little table which
I had to pass, a letter directed to myself, bearing the postmark,
Detroit.  What might there not be in it?  What?  What?

"Gasping as much with fear as delight, I caught up the letter, and,
rushing with it to my room, locked myself in and tore open the
envelope.  A single sheet fell out; it was signed with the name I
had heard whispered in my ear from early childhood, and always in
connection with riches and splendor and pleasures,--it was rapture
to dream of.  This was an agitation in itself, but the words--the
words!  I have never told them to mortal being, but I must tell
them now; I remember them as I remember the look of my child's face
when she was first put in my arms, the child--"

She had underrated her strength.  She broke into a storm of weeping
which shook to the very soul one of the two men who listened to
her, though he made no move to comfort her or allay it.  The
alienation thus expressed produced its effect, and, stricken deeper
than the fount of tears, she suddenly choked back every sob and
took up the thread of her narrative with the calmness born of
despair,

"These were the words, these and no others:

"'If my niece will break all ties and come to me completely
unhampered, she may hope to find a permanent home in my house and
a close hold upon my affections.

                                          IRA T. HOUGHTALING.'

"Unhampered! with the marriage-vow scarcely cold on my lips!
Without tie! and a husband waiting below to take me to his home on
the hillside--a hillside so bare and bleak that the sight of it had
sent a shudder to my heart as the wedding ring touched my finger.
The irony of the situation was more than I could endure, and alone,
with my eyes fixed on the comfortless heavens, showing gray and
cold through the narrow panes of my windows, I sank to the floor
insensible.

"When I came to myself I was still alone, and the twilight a little
more pronounced than when my misery had turned it to blackest
midnight.  Rising, I read that letter again, and, plainly as the
acknowledgment betrays the selfishness lying at the basis of my
character, the temptation which thereupon seized me had never an
instant of relenting or one conscientious scruple to combat it.  I
simply, at that stage in my life and experience, could not do
otherwise than I did.  Saying to myself that vows, as empty of
heart as mine, were void before God and man, I sat down and wrote
a few words to the man whose step on the stair I dreaded above
everything else in the world; and, leaving the note on the table,
unlocked my door and looked out.  The hall connecting with my room
was empty, but not so the lower one.  There I could hear voices and
laughter, Mr. Brainard's loud above all the rest,--a fatal sound to
me, cutting off all escape in that direction.  But another way
offered and that one near at hand.  Communicating with the very
hall in which I stood was an outside staircase running down to the
road--a means of entering and leaving a house which I never see now
wherever I may encounter it, without a gush of inward shame and
terror, so instinctive and so sharp that I have never been able to
hide it from any one whose eye might chance to be upon me at the
moment.  But that night I was conscious of no shame, barely of any
terror, only of the necessity for haste.  The train on which I was
determined to fly was due in a little less than an hour at a
station two miles down the road.

"That I should be followed farther than the turbulent stream which
crossed the road only a quarter of a mile from the hotel, I did not
fear.  For in the hurried note I had left behind me, I had bidden
them to look for me there, saying that I had been precipitate in
marrying one I did not really love, and, overcome by a sense of my
mistake, I was resolved on death.

"A lie! but what was a lie to me then, who saw in my life with this
man an amelioration of my present state, but an amelioration only,
while in the prospects held out to me by my uncle I foresaw not
only release from a hated union, but every delight which my soul
had craved since my mother could talk to me of wealth and splendor.

"Behold me, then, stealing down the side of the house in a darkness
which during the last few minutes had become impenetrable.  A
shadow, where all was shadowy, I made for the woods and succeeded
in reaching their shelter just as there rose in the distance behind
me that most terrible of all sounds to a woman's ear, a man's loud
cry of anguish and rage."

She was not looking at that man now, but I was.  As these words
left her lips, Mr. Steele's hand crept up and closed over his
heart, though his face was like that of a marble image set in
immovable lines.  I feared him, I admired him, and found myself
still looking at him as she went gaspingly on:

"Reckless of the dangers of the road, fearing nothing but what
pressed upon me from behind, I flew straight for the stream, on
whose verge I meant then to stop, and, having by some marvel of
good luck or Providence reached it without a mishap, I tore the
cloak from my shoulders, and, affixing one end to the broken edge
of the bridge, flung the other into the water.  Then with one loud
ear-piercing shriek thrown back on the wind--see!  I tell all--I
leave out nothing--I fled away in the direction of the station.

"For some reason I had great confidence in the success of this
feint and soon was conscious of but one fear, and that was being
recognized by the station-master, who knew my face and figure even
if he did not know my new city-made dress.  So when I had made sure
by the clock visible from the end window that I was in ample time
for the expected train, I decided to remain in the dark at the end
of the platform till the cars were about starting, and then to jump
on and buy my ticket from the conductor.

"But I never expected such an interminable wait.  Minute after
minute went by without a hint of preparation for the advancing
train.  The hour for leaving arrived, passed, and not a man had
shown himself on the platform.  Had a change been made in the
time-table?  If so, what a prospect lay before me!  Autumn nights
are chill in Minnesota, and, my cloak having been sacrificed, I
found poor protection in my neat but far from warm serge dress.
However, I did not fully realize my position till another passenger
arrived late and panting, and I heard some one shout out to him
from the open door that an accident had occurred below and that it
would be five hours at least before the train would come through.

"Five hours! and no shelter in sight save the impossible one of the
station itself.  How could I pass away that time!  How endure the
cold and fatigue?  By pacing to and fro in the road?  I tried it,
resolutely tried it, for an hour, then a new terror, a new
suspense, gripped me, and I discovered that I could never live
through the hours; never, in fact, take the train when it came
without knowing what had happened in Boone and whether the feint on
which I relied had achieved its purpose.  There was time to steal
back, time to see and hear what would satisfy me of my own safety;
and then to have some purpose in my movement!  How much better than
this miserable pacing back and forth just to start the stagnating
blood and make the lagging moments endurable!

"So I turned again toward Boone.  I was not in the mood to fear
darkness or any encounter save one, and experienced hesitation only
when I found myself reapproaching the bridge.  Shadows which had
protected me until now failed me there, and it was with caution I
finally advanced and emerged upon the open spot where the road
crossed the river.  But even this was not needed.  In the wide
stretch before me cut by the inky stream, I saw no signs of life,
and it was not till I was on the bridge itself that I discerned in
the black hollows below the glint of a lantern, lighting up the
bending forms of two or three men who were dragging at something
which heaved under their hands with the pull of the stream.

"It was a sight which has never left me, but one which gave wings
to my feet that night and sent me flying on till a fork in the road
brought me to a standstill.  To the left lay the hotel.  I could
see its windows glimmering with faint lights, while, away to the
right, there broke upon me from the hillside a solitary sparkle;
but this sparkle came from the house where, but for the letter
hidden in my heart, I should be sitting at this moment before my
own fireside.

"What moved me?  God knows.  It may have been duty; it may have
been curiosity; it may have been only dread to know the worst and
know it at once; but seeing that single gleam I began to move
toward it, and, before I was aware, I had reached the house, edged
up to its unshaded window and taken a frightened look within.

"I was prepared and yet unprepared for what I saw.  Within,
standing alone, with garments dripping, gazing in frenzy at a slip
of paper which clung wet about his hand, stood my husband.  My
words to him!  I could see it in his eyes and the desperation which
lit up all his features.

"Drawing back in terror from the road, I watched him fling that
letter of from his fingers as he would a biting snake, and,
striding to a cupboard high up on the wall, take down something I
could not see and did not guess at till the sharp sound of a
pistol-shot cleft my ear, and I beheld him fall face downward on
the carpet of fresh autumn leaves with which he had hidden the bare
floor in expectation of his bride.

"The shriek which involuntarily went up from my lips must have rung
far and wide, but only the groaning of the night-wind answered me.
Driven by my fears to do something to save him if he was not yet
dead, I tried the door, but it was locked; so was the window.  Yet
I might have battered my way in at that moment had I not heard two
men coming down the road, one of whom was shouting to the other: 'I
did not like his face.  I shan't sleep till I've seen him again.'

"Somewhat relieved, I drew back from the road, but did not quit the
spot till those men, seeing through the window what had happened,
worked their way in and lifted him up in their arms.  The look with
which they let him fall back again was eloquent, and convinced me
that it was death I saw.  I started again upon my shuddering flight
from Boone, secure in the belief that while my future would surely
hold remorse for me, it would nevermore burden me with a hindrance
in the shape of an unloved husband."




CHAPTER XXIV

THE SINS OF THE FATHERS


The suspense which had held us tense and speechless was for the
moment relieved and Mr. Steele allowed himself the following
explanation:

"My hand trembled and the bullet penetrated an inch too high."

Then he relapsed again into silence.

Mrs. Packard shuddered and went on:

"It may seem incredible to you, it seems incredible now to myself,
but I completed my journey, entered my uncle's house, was made
welcome there and started upon my new life without letting my eyes
fall for one instant on the columns of a newspaper. I did not dare to
see what they contained. That short but bitter episode of my
sixteenth year was a nightmare of horror, to be buried with my old
name and all that could interfere with the delights of the cultured
existence which my uncle's means and affection opened before me. Two
years and I hardly remembered; three years and it came to me only in
dreams; four and even dreams failed to suggest it; the present, the
glorious present was all. I had met you, Henry, and we had loved and
married.

"Did any doubts come to disturb my joy?  Very few.  I had never
received a word from Minnesota.  I was as dead to every one there
as they all were to me.  I believed myself free and that the only
wrong I did was in not taking you into my confidence.  But this,
the very nature of my secret forbade.  How could I tell you what
would inevitably alienate your affections?  That act of my early
girlhood by which I had gained an undeserved freedom had been too
base; sooner than let you know this blot on my life, I was content
to risk the possibility--the inconceivable possibility--of Mr.
Brainard's having survived the attack he had made upon his own
life.  Can you understand such temerity?  I can not, now that I see
its results before me.

"So the die was cast and I became a wife instead of the mere shadow
of one.  You were prosperous, and not a sorrow came to disturb my
sense of complete security till that day two weeks ago, when,
looking up in my own library, I saw, gleaming between me and the
evening lamp, a face, which, different as it was in many respects,
tore my dead past out of the grave and sent my thoughts reeling
back to a lonely road on a black hillside with a lighted window in
view, and behind that window the outstretched form of a man with
his head among leaves not redder than his blood.

"I have said to you, I have said to others, that a specter rose
upon me that day in the library.  It was such to me,--an apparition
and nothing else.  Perhaps he meant to impress himself as such, for
I had heard no footfall and only looked up because of the
constraining force of the look which awaited me.  I knew afterward
that it was a man whom I had seen, a man whom you yourself had
introduced into the house; but at the instant I thought it a
phantom of my forgotten past sent to shock and destroy me; and,
struck speechless with the horror of it, I lost that opportunity
of mutual explanation which might have saved me an unnecessary and
cruel experience.  For this man, who recognized me more surely than
I did him, who perhaps knew who I was before he ever entered my
house, has sported for two weeks with my fears and hopes as a
tiger with his prey.  Maintaining his attitude of stranger--you
have been witness to his manner in my presence--he led me slowly
but surely to believe myself deceived by an extraordinary
resemblance; a resemblance, moreover, which did not hold at all
times, and which frequently vanished altogether, as I recalled
the straight-featured but often uncouth aspect of the man who had
awakened the admiration of Boone.  Memory had been awakened
and my sleep filled with dreams, but the unendurable had been
spared me and I was thanking God with my whole heart, when suddenly
one night, when an evening spent with friends in the old way had
made me feel safe, my love safe, my husband and my child safe,
there came to my ears from below the sound of a laugh, loud, coarse
and deriding,--such a laugh as could spring from no member of my
own household, such a laugh as I heard but once before and that in
the by-gone years when some one asked Mr. Brainard if he meant to
live always in Boone.  The shock was terrible, and when I learned
that the secretary, and the secretary only, was below, I knew who
that secretary was and yielded to the blow.

"Yet hope dies hard with the happy.  I knew, but it was not enough
to know,--I must be sure.  There was a way--it came to me with my
first fluttering breath as I recovered from my faint.  In those old
days when I was thrown much with this man, he had shown me a
curious cipher and taught me how to use it.  It was original with
himself, he said, and some day we might be glad of a method of
communication which would render our correspondence inviolable.  I
could not see why he considered this likely ever to be desirable,
but I took the description of it which he gave me and promised that
I would never let it leave my person.  I even allowed him to solder
about my neck the chain which held the locket in which he had
placed it.  Consequently I had it with me when I fled from Boone,
and for the first few weeks after arriving at my uncle's house in
Detroit.  Then, wishing to banish every reminder of days I was so
anxious to forget, I broke that chain, destroyed the locket and hid
away from every one's sight the now useless and despised cipher.
Why I retained the cipher I can not explain.  Now, that cipher must
prove my salvation.  If I could find it again I was sure that the
shock of receiving from my hand certain words written in the
symbols he had himself taught me would call from him an
involuntary revelation.  I should know what I had to fear.  But so
many changes had taken place and so long a time elapsed since I hid
this slip of paper away that I was not even sure I still retained
it; but after spending a good share of the night in searching for
it, I finally came across it in one of my old trunks.

"The next morning I made my test.  Perhaps, Henry, you remember my
handing Mr. Steele an empty envelope to mail which he returned with
an air of surprise so natural and seemingly unfeigned that he again
forced me to believe that he was the stranger he appeared.  Though
he must have recognized at a glance--for he was an adept in this
cipher once--the seven simple symbols in which I had expressed the
great cry of my soul 'Is it you?' he acted the innocent secretary
so perfectly that all my old hopes returned and I experienced one
hour of perfect joy.  Then came another reaction.  Letty brought in
the baby with a paper pinned to her coat.  She declared to us that
a woman had been the instrument of this outrage, though the marks
inside, suggesting the cipher but with characteristic variations
bespeaking malice, could only have been made by one hand.

"How I managed to maintain sufficient hold upon my mind to drag the
key from my breast and by its means to pick out the meaning of the
first three words--words which once read suggested all the rest--I
can not now imagine.  Death was in my heart and the misery of it
all more than human strength could bear; yet I compared paper with
paper carefully, intelligently, till these words from the prayer-
book with all their threatening meaning to me and mine started into
life before me: 'Visiting the sins--'  Henry, you know the words
'Visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the
third and fourth generation.'  Upon the children!  Henry, he meant
Laura! our little Laura!  I had wakened vengeance in a fiend.  The
man who had calmly smiled in my face as he handed me back that
empty envelope inscribed with the wild appeal, 'Is it you?' was the
man I had once driven to the verge of the grave and who had come
back now to destroy us all.

"Yet, such is the reaching out of the drowning for straws, I did
not utterly despair till Nixon brought me from this man's
lodging-house, where I had sent him, a specimen of his handwriting.

"Nixon is the only confidant I have had.  Nixon knew me as a girl
when he worked in my uncle's home, and has always had the most
unbounded, I may say jealous, affection for me.  To him I had dared
impart that I did not trust your new secretary; that he looked like
a man I once knew who was a determined opponent of the party now
trying to elect you; that a specimen of his writing would make me
quite sure, and begged him to get it.  I thought he might pick up
such in the little office below, but he was never able to do so--Mr.
Steele has taken care not to leave a line written in this house--but
he did find a few lines signed with his name in his own room at the
boarding-house, and these he showed me before he told me the result
of his errand.  They settled all doubts.  What is to be my fate?
Surely this man has no real claim on me, after all these years,
when I thought myself your true and honest wife.  He may ruin your
campaign, defeat your hopes, overwhelm me with calumny and a loss
of repute, but surely, surely he can not separate us.  The law will
not uphold him in that; will it, Henry?  Say that it will not,
say--oh, say that--it--will not--do--that, or we shall live to
curse the day, not when we were born; but when our little innocent
child came to us!"




CHAPTER XXV

THE FINGER ON THE WALL


At this appeal the mayor rose and faced his secretary and the
spectacle was afforded me of seeing two strong men drawn up in
conflict over a woman both had cherished above all else.  And it
was characteristic of the forceful men, as well as the extreme
nature of the conflict, that both were quiet in manner and
speech--perhaps the mayor the more so, as he began the struggle
by saying:

"Is what Mrs. Packard says of your playing with her fears during
these two weeks true, Mr. Steele?"

Without a droop of his eye, or a tremor in his voice, the answer
came short, sharp and emphatic:

"Yes."

"Then, you are a villain! and I shall not feel myself called upon
to show you any consideration beyond what justice demands.  Have
you any plea to urge beyond the natural one of her seemingly
unprovoked desertion of you?  Has not my wife--" the nobility with
which he emphasized those two words made my heart swell--"spoken
the truth?"

Ah! then the mask of disdainful serenity with which the other had
hitherto veiled the burning anguish of his soul fell in one burst
of irresistible passion.

"True! yes, it is true.  But what does that truth involve for me?
Not two weeks, but seven years of torture, five of them devoted to
grief for her, loss, and two to rage and bitter revulsion against
her whole sex when I found her alive, and myself the despised
victim of her deception."

"She wronged you--she acknowledges that--but it was the wrong of an
unthinking child--not of a realizing woman.  Would you, a realizing
man, tear her now from home, from her child, from her place in the
community and my heart--make her despicable as well as unhappy,
just to feed your revenge?"

"Yes, I would do that."

"Jeopardize interests you have so often professed in my hearing to
be far above personal consideration--the success of your party, the
triumph of your political principles?"

"My political principles!"  Oh, the irony of his voice, the triumph
in his laugh!  "And what do you know of them?  What I have said.
Mayor Packard, your education as a politician has yet to be
completed before you will be fit for the governorship of a state.
I am an adept at the glorification of the party, of the man that it
suits my present exigencies to promote, but it is a faculty which
should have made you pause before you trusted me with the
furtherance and final success of a campaign which may outlast those
exigencies.  I have not always been of your party; I am not so now
at heart."

The mayor, outraged in every sentiment of honor as well as in the
most cherished feelings of his heart, lowered upon his unmoved
secretary with a wrath which would have borne down any other man
before it.

"Do you mean to say, you, that your work is a traitor's work?  That
the glorification you speak of is false?  That you may talk in my
favor, but that when you come to the issue, you will vote according
to your heart; that is, for Stanton?"

"I have succeeded in making myself intelligible."

The mayor flushed; indignation gave him vehemence.

"Then," he cried, "I take back the word by which I qualified you a
moment ago.  You are not a villain, you are a dastard."

Mr. Steele bowed in a way which turned the opprobrium into a
seeming compliment.

"I have suffered so many wrongs at your hands that I can not wonder
at suffering this one more."

Then slowly and with a short look at her: "The woman who has
queened it so long in C--- society can not wish to undergo the
charge of bigamy?"

"You will bring such a charge?"

"Certainly, if she does not voluntarily quit her false position,
and, accepting the protection of the man whose name is really hers,
go from this house at once."

At this alternative, uttered with icy deliberation, Mrs. Packard
recoiled with a sharp cry; but the mayor thrust a sudden sarcastic
query at his opponent:

"Which name?  Steele or Brainard?  You acknowledged both."

"My real name is Brainard; therefore, it is also hers.  But I shall
be content if she will take my present one of Steele.  More than
that, I shall be content if she will honestly accept from my hands
a place of refuge where I swear she shall remain unmolested by me
till this matter can be legally settled.  I do not wish to make
myself hateful to her, for I anticipate the day when she will be my
wife in heart as she is now in law."

"Never!"

The word rang out in true womanly revolt.  "I will die before that
day ever comes to separate me from the man I love and the child who
calls me mother.  You may force me from this house, you may plunge
me into poverty, into contumely, but you shall never make me look
upon myself as other than the wife of this good man, whom I have
wronged but will never disgrace."

"Madam," declared the inflexible secretary with a derisive
appreciation which bowed her once proud head upon her shamed
breast, "you are all I thought you when I took you from Crabbe's
back-pantry in Boone to make you the honor and glory of a life
which I knew then, as well as I do now, would not long run in
obscure channels."

It was a sarcasm calculated to madden the proud man who, only a few
minutes before, had designated the object of it by the sacred name
of wife.  But beyond a hasty glance at the woman it had bowed
almost to the ground, the mayor gave no evidence of feeling either
its force or assumption.  Other thoughts were in his mind than
those roused by jealous anger. "How old were you then?" he demanded
with alarming incongruity. The secretary started.  He answered,
however, calmly enough:

"I?  Seven years ago I was twenty-five.  I am thirty-two now."

"So I have heard you say.  A man of twenty-five is old enough to
have made a record, Mr. Steele--"  The mayor's tone hardened, so
did his manner; and I saw why he had been such a power in the
courts before he took up politics and an office.  "Mr. Steele, I do
not mean you to disturb my house or to rob me of my wife.  What was
your life before you met Olympia Brewster?"

A pause, the slightest in the world,--but the keen eye of the
astute lawyer noted it, and his tone grew in severity and
assurance. "You have known for two years that this woman whom you
called yours was within your reach, if not under your very eye, and
you forbore to claim her.  Has this delay had anything to do with
the record of those years to which I have just alluded?"

Had the random shot told?  The secretary's eye did not falter, nor
his figure lose an inch of its height, yet the impression made by
his look and attitude were not the same; the fire had gone out of
them; a blight had struck his soul--the flush of his triumph was
gone.

Mayor Packard was merciless.

"Only two considerations could hold back a man like you from urging
a claim he regarded as a sacred right; the fact of a former
marriage or the remembrance of a forfeited citizenship--pardon me,
we can not mince matters in a strait like this--which would
delegalize whatever contract you may have entered into."

Still the secretary's eye did not swerve, though he involuntarily
stretched forth his hand toward the table as if afraid of betraying
a tremor in his rigidly drawn-up figure.

"Was there the impediment of a former marriage?"

No answer from the sternly set lips.

"Or was it that you once served a term--a very short term, cut
short by a successful attempt at escape in a Minnesota prison?"

"Insults!" broke from those set lips and nothing more.

"Mr. Steele, I practised law in that state for a period of three
years.  All the records of the office and of the prison register
are open to me.  Over which of them should I waste my time?"

Then the tiger broke loose in the man who from the aggressor had
become the attacked, and he cried:

"I shall never answer; the devil has whispered his own suggestions
in your ear; the devil and nothing else."

But the mayor, satisfied that he made his point, smiled calmly,
saying:

"No, not the devil, but yourself.  You, even the you of seven years
back, would not have lived in any country town if necessity, or let
us say, safety, had not demanded it.  You, with your looks and your
ambitions,--to marry at twenty-five a girl from the kitchen!  any
girl, even if she had the making of an Olympia Packard, if you did
not know that it was in your power to shake her off when you got
ready to assert yourself, or better prospects offered?  The cipher
and the desirability you expressed of a means of communication
unreadable save by you two,--all this was enough to start the
suspicion; your own manner has done the rest.  Mr. Steele, you are
both a villain and a bastard, and have no right in law to this
woman.  Contradict me if you dare."

"I dare, but will not," was the violent reply.  "I shall not give
you even that satisfaction.  This woman who has gone through the
ceremony of marriage with both of us shall never know to which of
us she is the legal wife.  Perhaps it is as good a revenge as the
other.  It certainly will interfere as much with her peace."

"Oh, oh, not that!  I can not bear that!" leaped in anguish from
her lips.  "I am a pure woman, let no such torture be inflicted
upon me.  Speak!  tell the truth as you are the son of a woman you
would have us believe honest."

A smile then, cold but alive with gloating triumph, altered the
straight line of his lips for an instant as he advanced toward the
door.  "A woman over the possession of whom it is an honor to
quarrel!" were his words as he passed the mayor with a bow.

I looked to see the mayor spring and grasp him by the throat, but
that was left for another hand.  As the secretary bent to touch the
door it suddenly flew violently open and Nixon, quivering in every
limb and with his face afire, sprang in and seized upon the other
with a violence of passion which would have been deadly had there
been any strength behind it.

It was but child's play for so strong a man as Mr. Steele to shake
off so futile a grasp, and he did so with a rasping laugh.  But the
next moment he was tottering, blanched and helpless, and while
struggling to right himself and escape, yielded more and more to a
sudden weakness sapping his life-vigor, till he fell prone and
apparently lifeless on the lounge toward which, with a final
effort, he had thrown himself.

"Good!  Good!" rang thrilling through the room, as the old man
reeled back from the wall against which he had been cast.  "God has
finished what these old arms had only strength enough to begin.  He
is dead this time, and it's a mercy!  Thank God, Miss Olympia!
thank God as I do now on my knees!"  But here catching the mayor's
eye, he faltered to his feet again, saying humbly as he crept away:

"I couldn't help it, your Honor.  I shouldn't have been listening
at the door; but I have loved Miss Olympia, as we used to call her,
more than anything in the world ever since she came to make my old
master's house a place of sunshine, and all I'm sorry for is that
God had to do the finishing which twenty years ago I could have
done myself."




CHAPTER XXVI

"BITTER AS THE GRAVE"

But Nixon was wrong.  Mr. Steele did not die--not this time.  Cared
for by the physician who had been hastily summoned, he slowly but
surely revived and by midnight was able to leave the house.  As he
passed the mayor on his way out, I heard Mr. Packard say:

"I shall leave the house myself in a few minutes.  I do not mean
that your disaffection shall ruin my campaign any more than I mean
to leave a stone unturned to substantiate my accusation that you
had no right to marry and possess legal claims over the woman whose
happiness you have endeavored to wreck.  If you are wise you will
put no further hindrance in my way."

I heard no answer, for at that instant a figure appeared in the
open door which distracted all our attention.  Miss Thankful, never
an early sleeper and much given, as we know, to looking out of her
window, had evidently caught the note of disaster from the coming
and going of the doctor.  She had run in from next door and now
stood panting in the open doorway face to face with Mr. Steele,
with her two hands held out, in one of which, remarkable as it
seems to relate, I saw the package of bonds which I had been
fortunate enough to find for her.

The meeting seemed to paralyze both; her face which had been full
of tremulous feeling blanched and hardened, while he, stopped in
some speech or final effort he was about to make, yielded to the
natural brutality which underlay his polished exterior, and, in an
access of rage which almost laid him prostrate again, lifted his
arm and struck her out of his path.  As she reeled to one side the
bonds flew from her hand and lay at his feet; but he saw nothing;
he was already half-way down the walk and in another moment the
bang of his carriage door announced his departure.

The old lady, muttering words I could not hear, stared mute and
stricken at the bonds which the mayor had hastened to lift and
place in her hands.

Pitying her and anxious to relieve him from the embarrassment of
her presence when his own mind and heart were full of misery, I
rushed down to her side and endeavored to lead her away.  She
yielded patiently enough to my efforts, but, as she turned away,
she cast one look at the mayor and with the tears rolling down her
long and hollow cheeks murmured in horror and amaze:

"He struck me!"

The flash in Mayor Packard's eye showed sympathy, but the demands
of the moment were too great for him to give to those pathetic
words the full significance which I suddenly suspected them to
hold.  As I led her tottering figure down the step and turned
toward her door I said gently:

"Who was the man?  Who was it that struck you?"

She answered quickly and with broken-hearted emphasis  "My nephew!
my sister's son, and I had come to give him all our money.  We
have waited three days for him to come to us.  We thought he would
when he knew the bonds had been found, but he never came near,
never gave us a chance to enrich him; and when I heard he was ill
and saw the carriage which had come to take him away, we could not
stand it another minute and so I ran out and--and he struck me!
looked in my face and struck me!"

I folded her in my arms, there and then at the foot of her own
doorstep, and when I felt her heart beating on mine, I whispered:

"Bless God for it!  He has a hard and cruel heart, and would make
no good use of this money.  Live to spend it as your brother
desired, to make over the old house and reinstate the old name.  He
would not have wished it wasted on one who must have done you cruel
wrong, since he has lived so many days beside you without showing
his interest in you or even acknowledging your relationship."

"There were reasons," she protested, gently withdrawing herself,
but holding me for a minute to her side.  "He has had great
fortune--is a man of importance now--we did not wish to interfere
with his career.  It was only after the money was found that we
felt he should come.  We should not have asked him to take back his
old name, we should simply have given him what he thought best to
take and been so happy and proud to see him.  He is so handsome and
fortunate that we should not have begrudged it, if he had taken it
all.  But he struck me! he struck me!  He will never get a dollar
now."

Relieved, for the natural good sense of the woman was reasserting
itself, I gave her hands a squeeze and quickly ran back to where
the mayor was holding the door for me.

"She is all right now," I remarked, as I slid by him upstairs; and
that was all I said.  The rest must wait a more auspicious moment--
the moment when he really would have time to take up the gage which
Mr. Steele had thrown down to him in his final words.

I was not a witness to the parting interview between Mayor Packard
and his wife; I had stolen into the nursery, for a look at the
little one.  I found her sleeping sweetly, with one chubby hand
under her rounded cheek.  Thus had she lain and thus had she slept
during all those dreadful minutes, when her future hung, trembling
in the balance.




CHAPTER XXVII

A CHILD'S PLAYTHINGS


I was too much overwhelmed by all these events to close my eyes
that night.  The revelation of Mr. Steele's further duplicity,
coming so immediately upon the first, roused fresh surmises and
awakened thoughts which soon set my wits working in a direction as
new as it was unexpected.  I had believed my work over in this
house, but as I recalled all the occurrences of the evening and
turned the situation, as it now confronted me, over and over in my
mind, I felt that it had just begun.  There must be something in
this latest development to help us in the struggle which lay before
us.  The rage which sprang up in him as he confronted his old aunt
at this moment of his triumphant revenge argued a weakness in his
armor which it might yet be my part to discover and reveal.  I knew
Mrs. Packard well enough to realize that the serenity into which
she had fallen was a fictitious serenity, and must remain so as
long as any doubt remained of the legality of the tie uniting her
to this handsome fiend.  Were the means suggested by the mayor of
promising enough character to accomplish the looked-for end?

I remembered the man's eyes as the mayor let fall his word of
powerful threat, and doubted it.  Once recovered from the
indisposition which now weakened him, he would find means to thwart
any attempts made by Mayor Packard to undermine the position he had
taken as the legal husband of Olympia--sufficiently so, at least,
to hinder happiness between the pair whose wedded life he not only
envied but was determined to break up, unless some flaw in his past
could be discovered through Miss Quinlan--the aunt whose goodness
he had slighted and who now seemed to be in a frame of mind to help
our cause if its pitiful aspects were once presented to her.  I
resolved to present the case without delay.  Morning came at last,
and I refreshed myself as well as I could, and, after a short visit
to Mrs. Packard's bedside during which my purpose grew with every
moment I gazed down on her brave but pitiful face, put on my hat
and jacket and went next door.

I found the two old ladies seated in their state apartment making
calculations.  At sight of my face they both rose and the "O my
dear" from Miss Charity and the "God bless you, child," from Miss
Thankful showed that both hearts were yet warm.  Gradually I
introduced the topic of their nephew; gradually I approached the
vital question of the disgrace.

The result upset all my growing hopes.  He had never told them just
what the disgrace was.  They really knew nothing about his life
after his early boyhood.  He had come home that one time when
fortune so suddenly smiled upon them and they thought then that he
would tell them something; but the disappointment which had
followed effectually closed his lips, and he went away after a few
days of fruitless search, not to approach them again till just
before he took up the position of secretary to their great
neighbor.  Then he paid them one short and peremptory visit, during
which he was able to impress upon them his importance, his reasons
for changing his name, which they could not now remember, and the
great necessity which this made for them not to come near him as
their nephew.  They had tried to do what he asked, but it had been
hard. "Charity," Miss Thankful proceeded to bewail with a
forgetfulness of her own share in the matter, "had not been able to
keep her eyes long off the house which held, as she supposed, our
double treasure."  So this was all!  Nothing to aid me; nothing to
aid Mayor Packard. Rising in my disappointment, I prepared to
leave.  I had sufficient self-control and I hope good feeling not
to add to their distress at this time by any unnecessary
revelations of a past they were ignorant of, or the part this
unhappy nephew of theirs had played and still promised to play in
the lives of their immediate neighbors.

Miss Thankful squeezed my hand and Miss Charity gave me a kiss;
then as she saw her sister looking aside, whispered in my ear "I
want to show you something, all of Johnnie's little toys and the
keepsakes he sent us when he was a good boy and loved his aunts.
You will not think so badly of him then."

I let Miss Charity lead me away.  A drawer held all these
treasures.  I looked and felt to a degree the pathos of the scene;
but did not give special attention to what she thrust under my eyes
till she gave me a little old letter to read, soiled and torn with
the handling of many years and signed John Silverthorn Brainard.
Then something in me woke and I stared at this signature, growing
more and more excited as I realized that this was not the first
time I had seen it, that somewhere and in circumstances which
brought a nameless thrill I had looked upon it before and that--it
was not one remembrance but many which came to me.  What the spoken
name had not recalled came at the sight of this written one.  Bess!
there was her long and continued watch over the house once entered
by her on any and every pretext, but now shunned by her with a
secret terror which could not disguise her longing and its secret
attraction; her certificate of marriage; the name on this
certificate--the very one I was now staring at--John Silverthorn
Brainard!  Had I struck an invaluable clue?  Had I, through the
weakness and doting fondness of this poor woman, come upon the one
link which would yet lead us to identify this hollow-hearted, false
and most vindictive man of great affairs with the wandering and
worthless husband of the nondescript Bess, whose hand I had touched
and whose errand I had done, little realizing its purport or the
influence it would have upon our lives?  I dared not believe myself
so fortunate; it was much too like a fairy dream for me to rely on
it for a moment; yet the possibility was enough to rouse me to
renewed effort.  After we had returned to Miss Thankful's side, I
asked her, with an apology for my inexhaustible curiosity, if she
still felt afraid of the thread and needle woman across the way.

The answer was a little sharp.

"It is Charity who is afraid of her," said she.  She had evidently
forgotten her own extravagant words to me on this subject.
"Charity is timid; she thinks because this woman once hung over our
brother, night and day, that she knew about this money and had
persuaded herself that she has some right to it.  Charity is
sometimes mistaken, but she has some reason, if it is inadequate,
for this notion of hers.  That woman, since her dismissal after my
brother's death, has never really quit this neighborhood.  She
worked next door in any capacity she could, whenever any of the
tenants would take her; and when they would not, sewed or served in
the houses near by till finally she set up a shop directly opposite
its very door.  But she'll never get these bonds; we shall pay her
what is her due, but she'll never get any more."

"That would make her out a thief," I cried, "or--" but I thought
better of uttering what was in my mind.  Instead I asked how they
first came to hear of her.

Miss Charity showed some flustration at this and cast her sister an
appealing look; but Miss Thankful, eying her with some severity,
answered me with becoming candor:

"She was a lodger in this house.  We kept a few lodgers in those
days--be still, Charity!  Just thank God those days are over."

"A lodger?" I repeated.  "Did she ever tell you where she came
from?"

"Yes, she mentioned the place,--it was some town farther west.
That was when we were in such trouble about our brother and how we
should care for him.  She could nurse him, she said, and indeed
seemed very eager to do so, and we were glad to let her,--very
glad, till my brother showed such fear of her and of what she might
do if she once got hold of his wallet."

"You possibly did her injustice," I said.  "A sick man's fancies
are not always to be relied on.  What did your nephew think of her?
Did he share your distrust of her?"

"John?  Oh, yes, I believe so.  Why do we always come back to the
subject of John?  I want to forget him; I mean to forget him; I
mean that Charity shall forget him."

"Let us begin then from this moment," I smiled; then quickly: "You
knew that Bess was a married woman."

"No, we knew nothing about her."

"Not even the name she went by?"

"Oh, that was Brown."

"Brown," I muttered, turning for a second time to go.  "You must
think me inquisitive, but if I had not been," I added with a merry
laugh, "I should never have found your bonds for you."  Pressing
both their hands in mine I ran hastily out of the room.

At once I crossed the street to Bess' little shop.




CHAPTER XXVIII

RESTITUTION


"Bess, why are you so white?  What has happened to you in the last
twenty-four hours?  Have you heard from him?"

"No, no; I'm all right."  But her eyes, hunted and wandering,
belied her words.

I drew her hands down into mine across the table lying between us.

"I want to help you," I whispered; "I think I can.  Something has
happened which gives me great hope; only do me a favor first; show
me, as you promised, the papers which I dug out for you."

A smile, more bitter than any tear, made her face look very hard
for an instant, then she quietly led the way into the small room at
the back.  When we were quite alone, she faced me again and putting
her hand to her breast took out the much creased, much crumpled bit
of paper which was her only link to youth, to her life, and to her
love.

"This is all that will interest you," said she, her eyes brimming
in spite of herself.  "It is my marriage certificate.  The one
thing that proves me an honest woman and the equal of--" she
paused, biting back her words and saying instead--"of any one I
see.  My husband was a gentleman."

It was with trembling hands I unfolded the worn sheet.  Somehow the
tragedy of the lives my own had touched so nearly for the last few
days had become an essential part of me.

"John Silverthorn Brainard," I read, the name identical with the
one I had just seen as the early signature of the man who claimed
a husband's rights over Mrs. Packard.  The date with what anxiety
I looked at it!--preceded by two years that of the time he united
himself to Olympia Brewster.  No proof of the utter falsity of his
dishonorable claim could be more complete.  As I folded up the
paper and handed it back, Bess noted the change which had come to
me.  Panting with excitement she cried:

"You look happy, happy!  You know something you have not told me.
What?  what?  I'm suffocating, mad to know; speak--speak--"

"Your husband is a man not unknown to any of us.  You have seen him
constantly.  He is--"

"Yes, yes; did he tell you himself?  Has he done me so much
justice?  Oh, say that his heart has softened at last; that he is
ready to recognize me; that I have not got to find those bonds--but
you do not know about the bonds--nobody does.  I shouldn't have
spoken; he would be angry if he knew.  Angry?  and I have suffered
so much from his anger!  He is not a gentle man."

How differently she said this from the gentleman of a few minutes
back!

"But he doesn't know that I am here," she burst out in another
instant, as I hunted for some word to say.  "He would kill me if he
did; he once swore that he would kill me if I ever approached him
or put in any claim to him till he was ready to own me for his wife
and give me the place that is due me.  Don't tell me that I have
betrayed myself, I've been so careful; kept myself so entirely out
of his eyes, even last night when I saw the doctor go in and felt
that it was for him, and pictured him to myself as dying without a
word from me or a look to help me bear the pain.  He was ill,
wasn't he?--but he got better.  I saw him come out, very feeble and
uncertain.  Not like himself, not like the strong and too, too
handsome man who has wrung my heart in his hand of steel,--wrung it
and thrown it away."

Sobs shook her and she stopped from lack of power to utter either
her terror or her grief.  But she looked the questions she could no
longer put, and compassionating her misery, I gently said:

"Your love has been fixed upon a very unstable heart; but you have
rights which must yet insure you his support.  There is some one
who will protect these rights and protect you in your efforts to
substantiate them."

"His aunt," she put in, shaking her head.  "She can do nothing,
unless--"  Her excitement became abnormal.  "Have they found the
money?" she shrieked; "have they--have they found the money?"

I could not deceive her; she had seen it in my eye.

"And they will--"

"Hardly," I whispered.  "He has displeased them; they can not be
generous to him now."

Her hopes sank as if the very basis of her life had been taken
away.

"It was my only hope," she murmured.  "With that money in my hand--
some, any of it, I could have dared his frown and won in a little
while his good will, but now--I can only anticipate rebuff.  There
is nothing for me to hope for now.  I must continue to be Bess, the
thread and needle woman."

"I did not say that the one to reinstate you was Miss Quinlan."

"Who then? who then?"

"Mayor Packard."

And then I had to tell her.

We all know the results of the election by which Governor Packard
holds his seat, but few persons outside of those mentioned in this
history know why the event of his homecoming from a trip he made to
Minnesota brought a brighter and more lasting light into his wife's
eyes than the news of his astonishing political triumph.

He had substantiated facts by which Mr. Steele's claims upon Mrs.
Packard were annulled and Bess restored to her rights, if not to
her false husband's heart and affections.  There are times, though,
when I do not even despair of the latter; constant illness is
producing a perceptible change in the man, and it seemed to me,
from what Mrs. John Brainard told me one day after she had been
able, through the kindness of the Misses Quinlan, to place the
amount of one of the bonds in his hands, that his eyes were
beginning to learn their true lesson and that he would yet find
charm in his long neglected wife. It was not to be wondered at, for
with hope and the advantages of dress with which the Misses Quinlan
now took pleasure in supplying her, she was gradually becoming an
unusually fine woman.

I remained with Mrs. Packard till they left town for the capital;
remained to enjoy to the full the joy of these reunited hearts, and
to receive the substantial reward which they insisted on bestowing
upon me.  One of the tasks with which I whiled away the many hours
in which I found myself alone was the understanding and proper
mastery of the cipher which had played such a part in the evolution
of the life-drama enacted before my eyes.

It was very simple.  With the following diagram as a key and a
single hint as to its management, you will at once comprehend its
apparent intricacies:

AB | CD | EF            \ST/
___|____|___           UV\/WX
GH | IJ | KL             /\
___|____|___            /YZ\
MN | OP | QR

The dot designated that the letter used was the second in the
indicated division.

The hint to which I allude is this.  With every other word the
paper is turned in the hands toward the left.  This alters the
shape and direction of the angle or part of square symbolizing the
several letters, and creates the confusion which interfered with my
solution of its mysteries the night I subjected it, with such
unsatisfactory results, to the tests which had elucidated the
cryptogram in The Gold Bug.

THE END









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