s, or in what direction I was going.
That her young mistress in the momentary conversation they had held
before our departure had succeeded in giving her some idea of the shame
with which she had felt herself overwhelmed and her present natural
desire for secrecy, I do not doubt, but I think now, as I thought then,
that the unusual precautions taken both at that time and before, to keep
me in ignorance of the young lady's identity, were due to the elderly
woman's own consciousness of the peril she had invoked in yielding to
the wishes of her young and thoughtless mistress; a theory which, if
true, argues more for the mind than the conscience of this mysterious
woman. However, it is with facts we have to deal, and you will be more
interested in learning what I did, than what I thought during that short
ride in perfect darkness.

The mark which I had left on the curbstone behind me sufficiently showed
the nature of my resolve, and when we made the first turn at the end of
the block I leaned back in my seat and laying my finger on my wrist,
began to count the pulsations of my blood. It was the only device that
suggested itself, by which I might afterward gather some approximate
notion of the distance we travelled in a straight course down town. I
had just arrived at the number seven hundred and sixty-two, and was
inwardly congratulating myself upon this new method of reckoning
distance, when the wheels gave a lurch and we passed over a car track.
Instantly all my fine calculations fell to the ground. We were not in
Madison Avenue, as I supposed; could not be, since no track crosses that
avenue below Fifty-ninth Street, and we were proceeding on as we could
not have done had we gained the terminus of the avenue at Twenty-third
Street. Could it be that the carriage had not been turned around while I
was in the house, and that we had come back by way of Fifth Avenue? I
could not remember--in fact, the more I tried to think which way the
horses' heads were directed when we went into the house, the more I was
confused. But presently I considered that wherever we were, we certainly
had not passed over the narrow strip of smooth pavement in front of the
Worth monument, and therefore could not have reached Twenty-third Street
by way of Fifth Avenue. We must be up town, and that track we crossed
must have been at Fifty-ninth Street. And soon, as if to assure me of
this, we took a turn, quickly followed at a block's length by another