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,