ich I attributed the loss.
But I told her all that the officer had said to me, and that I hoped to
bring her the trunk at her aunt's before the day was over.

Fausta took my news, however, with a start which frightened me. All her
money, but a shilling or two, was in the trunk. To place money in trunks
is a weakness of the female mind which I have nowhere seen accounted
for. Worse than this, though,--as appeared after a moment's examination
of her travelling _sac_,--her portfolio in the trunk contained the
letter of the aunt whom she came to visit, giving her her address in
the city. To this address she had no other clew but that her aunt was
Mrs. Mary Mason, had married a few years before a merchant named Mason,
whom Miss Jones had never seen, and of whose name and business this was
all she knew. They lived in a numbered street, but whether it was Fourth
Street, or Fifty-fourth, or One Hundred and Twenty-fourth, or whether it
was something between, the poor child had no idea. She had put up the
letter carefully, but had never thought of the importance of the
address. Besides this aunt, she knew no human being in New York.

"Child of the Public," I said to myself, "what do you do now?" I had
appealed to my great patron in sending for the officer, and on the whole
I felt that my sovereign had been gracious to me, if not yet hopeful.
But now I must rub my lamp again, and ask the genie where the unknown
Mason lived. The genie of course suggested the Directory, and I ran for
it to the clerk's office. But as we were toiling down the pages of
"Masons," and had written off thirteen or fourteen who lived in numbered
streets, Fausta started, looked back at the preface and its date, flung
down her pencil in the only abandonment of dismay in which I ever saw
her, and cried, "First of May! They were abroad until May. They have
been abroad since the day they were married!" So that genie had to put
his glories into his pocket, and carry his Directory back to the office
again.

The natural thing to propose was, that I should find for Miss Jones a
respectable boarding-house, and that she should remain there until her
trunk was found, or till she could write to friends who had this fatal
address, and receive an answer. But here she hesitated. She hardly liked
to explain why,--did not explain wholly. But she did not say that she
had no friends who knew this address. She had but few relations in the
world, and her aunt had communicated