was long ago." He tapped the key
thoughtfully on the mantel. "You see how the lock stuck, and the door. I
don't expect Agnes had it open for years. I expect she wandered, like
her mother." He peered vaguely in at the empty space, and then turned to
me. "I forget a great deal now. I'm getting an old man, a very old man,"
he said, in an explanatory tone.

"But did you know she had letters somewhere, a pile of papers? You
remember her getting letters, do you not, letters from her lover?"

He looked up at me apologetically, with dim, watery blue eyes. "I don't
expect I remember much," he confessed. "Not of later years. I could tell
you all about things when I was a boy, but I can't seem to remember much
that's happened since mother died. That must have been along about
twenty years ago. I'm all broken down now, old--very old. You see I am a
very old man."

I left him shutting the room into darkness, and passed out into the
sunlight, sorely perplexed.

Mrs. Libby was baking when I returned, and the air of the kitchen was
full of the sweet, hot smell that gushed from the oven door she had just
opened. She stood placidly eating the remnants of dough that clung to
the pan.

"Mrs. Libby," said I, sinking down on the door-step, "what was the name
of Agnes Rayne's lover? You told me once you could not remember. Will
you try to think, please?"

"Well, I was talking to Mrs. Hikes after the fun'r'l," said Mrs. Libby,
still devouring the dough. "He boarded to the Hikeses', you see, 'n' she
had it as pat as her own," and then Mrs. Libby mentioned calmly a name
that now you can hardly pass a book-stall without reading, a name that
of late is a synonym for marvellous and unprecedented success in the
literary world. I had met this great man at a reception the winter
before; let me rather say, I had stood reverently on the outskirts of a
crowd of adorers that flocked around him. I looked so fixedly at Mrs.
Libby that her smile broadened.

"Don't know him, do you?" she queried.

"I think I have met him," I replied. "Was he engaged to Agnes Rayne?"

Mrs. Libby waited to pierce a loaf of cake with a broom splint. She ran
her thick fingers carefully along the splint and then turned the brown
loaf on to a sieve.

"Mrs. Hikes says she don't believe a word of it. Folks think he just
courted her one spell that summer, not real serious, just to pass the
time away, you might say, like many another young man. Mrs. Hikes says,
she never h