n doubt. With a gesture toward the type-writer, he
asked me if I was accustomed to its use; and when I acknowledged some
sort of acquaintance with it, he drew an unanswered letter from a pile
on the table and requested me to copy it as a sample.

I immediately sat down before the type-writer. I was in something of a
maze, but felt that I must follow his lead. As I proceeded to insert the
paper and lay out the copy to hand, he crossed over to the young man at
the other end of the room and began a short conversation which ended in
some trivial demand that sent the young man from the room. As the door
closed behind him Mayor Packard returned to my side.

"Keep on with your work and never mind mistakes," said he. "What I want
is to hear the questions you told me to expect from you if you stayed."

Seemingly Mayor Packard did not wish this young man to know my position
in the house. Was it possible he did not wholly trust him? My hands
trembled from the machine and I was about to turn and give my full
thought to what I had to say. But pride checked the impulse. "No," I
muttered in quick dissuasion, to myself. "He must see that I can do two
things at once and do both well." And so I went on with the letter.

"When," I asked, "did you first see the change in Mrs. Packard?"

"On Tuesday afternoon at about this time."

"What had happened on that day? Had she been out?"

"Yes, I think she told me later that she had been out."

"Do you know where?"

"To some concert, I believe. I did not press her with questions, Miss
Saunders; I am a poor inquisitor."

Click, click; the machine was working admirably.

"Have you reason to think," I now demanded, "that she brought her
unhappiness in with her, when she returned from that concert?"

"No; for when I returned home myself, as I did earlier than usual
that night, I heard her laughing with the child in the nursery. It was
afterward, some few minutes afterward, that I came upon her sitting in
such a daze of misery, that she did not recognize me when I spoke to
her. I thought it was a passing mood at the time; she is a sensitive
woman and she had been reading--I saw the book lying on the floor at her
side; but when, having recovered from her dejection--a dejection, mind
you, which she would neither acknowledge nor explain--she accompanied
me out to dinner, she showed even more feeling on our return, shrinking
unaccountably from leaving the carriage and showing, not only in this