essary, I accompanied the secretary to the street.

"Now," said I, "tell me all you know of this frightful affair."

"All I know? A few words will do that. I left him last night sitting as
usual at his library table, and found him this morning, seated in the
same place, almost in the same position, but with _a._ bullet-hole in
his head as large as the end of my little finger."

"Dead?"

"Stone-dead."

"Horrible!" I exclaimed. Then, after a moment, "Could it have been a
suicide?"

"No. The pistol with which the deed was committed is not to be found."

"But if it was a murder, there must have been some motive. Mr.
Leavenworth was too benevolent a man to have enemies, and if robbery was
intended----"

"There was no robbery. There is nothing missing," he again interrupted.
"The whole affair is a mystery."

"A mystery?"

"An utter mystery."

Turning, I looked at my informant curiously. The inmate of a house in
which a mysterious murder had occurred was rather an interesting object.
But the good-featured and yet totally unimpressive countenance of the
man beside me offered but little basis for even the wildest imagination
to work upon, and, glancing almost immediately away, I asked:

"Are the ladies very much overcome?"

He took at least a half-dozen steps before replying.

"It would be unnatural if they were not." And whether it was the
expression of his face at the time, or the nature of the reply itself,
I felt that in speaking of these ladies to this uninteresting,
self-possessed secretary of the late Mr. Leavenworth, I was somehow
treading upon dangerous ground. As I had heard they were very
accomplished women, I was not altogether pleased at this discovery. It
was, therefore, with a certain consciousness of relief I saw a Fifth
Avenue stage approach.

"We will defer our conversation," said I. "Here's the stage."

But, once seated within it, we soon discovered that all intercourse upon
such a subject was impossible. Employing the time, therefore, in
running over in my mind what I knew of Mr. Leavenworth, I found that my
knowledge was limited to the bare fact of his being a retired merchant
of great wealth and fine social position who, in default of possessing
children of his own, had taken into his home two nieces, one of whom had
already been declared his heiress. To be sure, I had heard Mr. Veeley
speak of his eccentricities, giving as an instance this very fact of his
making a will in favor of one