and
still held its place in my mind as something I had dreamed.

He was looking up when he said it, up the hill, up toward Mrs. Carew's
house. He had struck his own breast, but he had looked up, not down; and
though I had naturally associated the word he had used with himself--and
Miss Graham, with a womanly intuition, had supplied me with an
explanation of the same which was neither far-fetched nor unnatural, yet
all through this day of startling vicissitudes and unimaginable
interviews, faint doubts, bidden and unbidden, had visited my mind,
which at this moment culminated in what I might call the irresistible
question as to whether he might not have had in mind some one nearer and
dearer than himself when he uttered that accusing word.

Her position, as I saw it now, did not make this supposition too
monstrous for belief; that is, if she secretly loved this man who did
not dare, or was too burdened with responsibility, to woo her. And who
can penetrate a woman's mind? To give him--possibly without his
knowledge--what every one who knew him declared him to stand in special
need of--money and relief from too exacting work--might have seemed
motive enough to one of her warm and impulsive temperament, for
eliminating the child she cared for, but not as she cared for him. It
was hard to think it; it would be harder yet to act upon it; but the
longer I stood there brooding, the more I felt my conviction grow that
from her and from her alone, we should yet obtain definite traces of the
missing child, if only Mrs. Ocumpaugh would uphold me in the attempt.

But would Mrs. Ocumpaugh do this? I own that I had my doubts. Some
hidden cause or instinct which I had not been able to reach, though I
had plunged deep into the most galling secrets of her life, seemed to
stand in the way of her full acceptance of the injury I believed her to
have received from Mrs. Carew; or rather, in the way of her public
acknowledgment of it. Though she would fain have this upturning of the
bungalow cellar pass for an act of frenzy, I could not quite bring
myself to look upon it as such since taking a final observation of its
condition.

Though her professed purpose had been to seek the body of her child, the
spades had not gone deeper than their length. It had been harrowing, not
digging, she had ordered, and harrowing meant nothing more than an
obliteration of the footprints which I had menaced her with comparing
with those of Mrs. Carew. Why