eping with their age and infirmities.

It would be natural to regard the whole matter as an hallucination on
their part, to disbelieve in the existence of the bonds, and to regard
Miss Thankful's whole story to Mrs. Packard as the play of a diseased
imagination.

But I could not, would not, carry my own doubts to this extent. The
bonds had been in existence; Miss Thankful had seen them; and the one
question calling for answer now was, whether they had been long ago
found and carried off, or whether they were still within the reach of
the fortunate hand capable of discovering their hiding-place.

The nurse who, according to Miss Thankful, had wakened such dread in
the dying man's breast as to drive him to the attempt which had ended
in this complete loss of the whole treasure, appeared to me the chief
factor in the first theory. If any one had ever found these bonds, it
was she; how, it was not for me to say, in my present ignorant state
of the events following the reclosing of the house after this old man's
death and burial. But the supposition of an utter failure on the part
of this woman and of every other subsequent resident of the house to
discover this mysterious hiding-place, wakened in me no real instinct of
search. I felt absolutely and at once that any such effort in my present
blind state of mind would be totally unavailing. The secret trap and
the passage it led to, with all the opportunities they offered for the
concealment of a few folded documents, did not, strange as it may appear
at first blush, suggest the spot where these papers might be lying
hid. The manipulation of the concealed mechanism and the difficulties
attending a descent there, even on the part of a well man, struck me
as precluding all idea of any such solution to this mystery. Strong
as dying men sometimes are in the last flickering up of life in the
speedily dissolving frame, the lowering of this trap, and, above all,
the drawing of it back into place, which I instinctively felt would be
the hardest act of the two, would be beyond the utmost fire or force
conceivable in a dying man. No, even if he, as a member of the family,
knew of this subterranean retreat, he could not have made use of it. I
did not even accept the possibility sufficiently to approach the place
again with this new inquiry in mind. Yet what a delight lay in the
thought of a possible finding of this old treasure, and the new life
which would follow its restoration to t