t the young man and woman coming in the night, you know."

"Keep to it!" I whispered back, recognizing the scrub-woman, who had
sidled up to me from some unknown quarter in the semi-darkness. "Why,
it's true. Why shouldn't I keep to it."

A chuckle, difficult to describe but full of meaning, shook the arm of
the woman as she pressed close to my side.

"Oh, you are a good one," she said. "I didn't know they made 'em so
good!" And with another chuckle full of satisfaction and an odd sort of
admiration I had certainly not earned, she slid away again into the
darkness.

Certainly there was something in this woman's attitude towards this
affair which merited attention.

V.

"THIS IS NO ONE I KNOW."

I welcomed the Misses Van Burnam with just enough good-will to show that
I had not been influenced by any unworthy motives in asking them to my
house.

I gave them my guest-chamber, but I invited them to sit in my front room
as long as there was anything interesting going on in the street. I knew
they would like to look out, and as this chamber boasts of a bay with
two windows, we could all be accommodated. From where I sat I could now
and then hear what they said, and I considered this but just, for if the
young woman who had suffered so untimely an end was in any way connected
with them, it was certainly best that the fact should not lie concealed;
and one of them, that is Isabella, is such a chatterbox.

Mr. Van Burnam and his son had returned next door, and so far as we
could observe from our vantage-point, preparations were being made for
the body's removal. As the crowd below, driven away by the policemen one
minute, only to collect again in another, swayed and grumbled in a
continual expectation that was as continually disappointed, I heard
Caroline's voice rise in two or three short sentences.

"They can't find Howard, or he would have been here before now. Did you
see her that time when we were coming out of Clark's? Fanny Preston did,
and said she was pretty."

"No, I didn't get a glimpse----" A shout from the street below.

"I can't believe it," were the next words I heard, "but Franklin is
awfully afraid----"

"Hush! or the ogress----" I am sure I heard her say ogress; but what
followed was drowned in another loud murmur, and I caught nothing
further till these sentences were uttered by the trembling and
over-excited Caroline: "If it is she, pa will never be the same man
again. To have her die