rced him to swear
silence about my visit; I made him promise not to reveal my identity
to Lida; and I told him--Heaven forgive me!--that I was well and
prosperous and happy.

Dear old Isaac! I would not let him come to see me, but the next
day there came a basket, with six bottles of wine, and an old
daguerreotype of my mother, that had been his treasure. Nor was that
basket the last.

CHAPTER IX

The coroner held an inquest over the headless body the next day,
Tuesday. Mr. Graves telephoned me in the morning, and I went to the
morgue with him.

I do not like the morgue, although some of my neighbors pay it weekly
visits. It is by way of excursion, like nickelodeons or watching the
circus put up its tents. I have heard them threaten the children that
if they misbehaved they would not be taken to the morgue that week!

I failed to identify the body. How could I? It had been a tall woman,
probably five feet eight, and I thought the nails looked like those of
Jennie Brice. The thumb-nail of one was broken short off. I told
Mr. Graves about her speaking of a broken nail, but he shrugged his
shoulders and said nothing.

There was a curious scar over the heart, and he was making a sketch
of it. It reached from the center of the chest for about six inches
across the left breast, a narrow thin line that one could hardly see.
It was shaped like this:

I felt sure that Jennie Brice had had no such scar, and Mr. Graves
thought as I did. Temple Hope, called to the inquest, said she had
never heard of one, and Mr. Ladley himself, at the inquest, swore that
his wife had had nothing of the sort. I was watching him, and I
did not think he was lying. And yet--the hand was very like Jennie
Brice's. It was all bewildering.

Mr. Ladley's testimoney at the inquest was disappointing. He was cool
and collected: said he had no reason to believe that his wife was
dead, and less reason to think she had been drowned; she had left him
in a rage, and if she found out that by hiding she was putting him in
an unpleasant position, she would probably hide indefinitely.

To the disappointment of everybody, the identity of the woman remained
a mystery. No one with such a scar was missing. A small woman of
my own age, a Mrs. Murray, whose daughter, a stenographer, had
disappeared, attended the inquest. But her daughter had had no such
scar, and had worn her nails short, because of using the typewriter.
Alice Murray was the missing girl'