he hands which had once touched
it only to lose it on the instant.

The charm of this idea was still upon me when I woke the next morning.
At breakfast I thought of the bonds, and in the hour which followed, the
work I was doing for Mrs. Packard in the library was rendered difficult
by the constant recurrence of the one question into my mind: "What would
a man in such a position do with the money he was anxious to protect
from the woman he saw coming and secure to his sister who had just
stepped next door?" When a moment came at last in which I could really
indulge in these intruding thoughts, I leaned back in my chair and tried
to reconstruct the room according to Mrs. Packard's description of it at
that time. I even pulled my chair over to that portion of the room where
his bed had stood, and, choosing the spot where his head would naturally
lie, threw back my own on the reclining chair I had chosen, and
allowed my gaze to wander over the walls before me in a vague hope of
reproducing, in my mind, the ideas which must have passed through his
before he rose and thrust those papers into their place of concealment.
Alas! those walls were barren of all suggestion, and my eyes went
wandering through the window before me in a vague appeal, when a sudden
remembrance of his last moments struck me sharply and I bounded up with
a new thought, a new idea, which sent me in haste to my room and brought
me down again in hat and jacket. Mrs. Packard had once said that the
ladies next door were pleased to have callers, and advised me to visit
them. I would test her judgment in the matter. Early though it was, I
would present myself at the neighboring door and see what my reception
would be. The discovery I had made in my unfortunate accident in the old
entry way should be my excuse. Apologies were in order from us to them;
I would make these apologies.

I was prepared to confront poverty in this bare and comfortless-looking
abode of decayed gentility. But I did not expect quite so many evidences
of it as met my eyes as the door swung slowly open some time after my
persistent knock, and I beheld Miss Charity's meager figure outlined
against walls and a flight of uncarpeted stairs such as I had never
seen before out of a tenement house. I may have dropped my eyes, but I
recovered myself immediately. Marking the slow awakening of pleasure
in the wan old face as she recognized me, I uttered some apology for my
early call and then waited