mored her. I was tired of
working against her, and was willing she should have her own way for a
time."

"And for this reason you let her fit herself out with clothes down to
her very undergarments?"

"Yes; strange as it may seem, I was just such a fool. I had entered into
her scheme, and the means she took to change her personality only amused
me. She wished to present herself to my father as a girl obliged to work
for her living, and was too shrewd to excite suspicion in the minds of
any of the family by any undue luxury in her apparel. At least that was
the excuse she gave me for the precautions she took, though I think the
delight she experienced in anything romantic and unusual had as much to
do with it as anything else. She enjoyed the game she was playing, and
wished to make as much of it as possible."

"Were her own garments much richer than those she ordered from
Altman's?"

"Undoubtedly. Mrs. Van Burnam wore nothing made by American
seamstresses. Fine clothes were her weakness."

"I see, I see; but why such an attempt on your part to keep yourself in
the background? Why let your wife write your assumed names in the hotel
register, for instance, instead of doing it yourself?"

"It was easier for her; I know no other reason. She did not mind putting
down the name Pope. I did."

It was an ungracious reflection upon his wife, and he seemed to feel it
so; for he almost immediately added: "A man will sometimes lend himself
to a scheme of which the details are obnoxious. It was so in this case;
but she was too interested in her plans to be affected by so small a
matter as this."

This explained more than one mysterious action on the part of this pair
while they were at the Hotel D----. The Coroner evidently considered it
in this light, for he dwelt but little longer on this phase of the case,
passing at once to a fact concerning which curiosity had hitherto been
roused without receiving any satisfaction.

"In leaving the hotel," said he, "you and your wife were seen carrying
certain packages, which were missing from your arms when you alighted at
Mr. Van Burnam's house. What was in those packages, and where did you
dispose of them before you entered the second carriage?"

Howard made no demur in answering.

"My wife's clothes were in them," said he, "and we dropped them
somewhere on Twenty-seventh Street near Third Avenue, just as we saw an
old woman coming along the sidewalk. We knew that she would sto