pe."

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