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