nds! Why,
she told me--my own letters!--my--" And then brutal man was brought to
his senses and made to see how heartless and cruel was his conduct,
for Mrs. Plume went into a fit and Mrs. Lynn for the doctor.

That was a wild night at Sandy. Two young matrons had made up their
minds that it was shameful to leave poor Mrs. Plume without anybody to
listen to her, when she might so long for sympathetic hearers, and
have so much to tell. They had entered as soon as the major came forth
and, softly tapping at the stricken one's door, had been with her
barely five minutes when he came tearing back, and all this tremendous
scene occurred before they could put in a word to prevent, which, of
course, they were dying to do. But what _hadn't_ they heard in that
swift moment! Between the two of them--and Mrs. Bridger was the
other--their agitation was such that it all had to be told. Then, like
the measles, one revelation led to another, but it was several days
before the garrison settled down in possession of an array of facts
sufficient to keep it in gossip for many a month. Meanwhile, many a
change had come over the scene.

At Prescott, then the Territorial capital, Elise Layton, _nee_ Lebrun,
was held without bail because it couldn't be had, charged with
obtaining money under false pretenses, bigamy as a side issue, and
arson as a possible backstop. The sleep-walking theory, as advanced in
favor of Mrs. Plume, had been reluctantly abandoned, it appearing
that, however dazed and "doped" she may have been through the
treatment of that deft-fingered, unscrupulous maid, she was
sufficiently wide awake to know well whither she had gone at that
woman's urging, to make a last effort to recover certain letters of
vital importance. At Blakely's door Clarice had "lost her nerve" and
insisted on returning, but not so Elise. She went again, and had
well-nigh gotten Downs drunk enough to do as she demanded. Frankly,
sadly, Plume went to Blakely, told him of his wife's admissions, and
asked him what papers of hers he retained. For a moment Blakely had
blazed with indignation, but Plume's sorrow, and utter innocence of
wrong intent, stilled his wrath and led to his answer: "Every letter
of Mrs. Plume's I burned before she was married, and I so assured her.
She herself wrote asking me to burn rather than return them, but there
were letters and papers I could not burn, brought to me by a poor
devil that woman Elise had married, tricked into