found myself forced to believe
that our first visitor had been as real as the last; in other words, the
same woman.

But could I prove it? Could the seemingly impossible be made possible
and the unexplainable receive a solution satisfying to a rational mind?
I determined to make an effort to accomplish this, if only to relieve
the mind of my wife, who had not recovered her equanimity as readily as
myself.

Starting with the assumption above mentioned--that the woman who
had died in our presence was the same who had previously found an
unexplainable entrance into these same rooms--I first inquired if the
black cloak lined with gray did not offer a solution to some of my
previous difficulties. It was a long cloak, enveloping her completely.
When worn with the black side out, she would present an inconspicuous
appearance, but with the gray side out and the effect of this heightened
by a long gray veil flung over her hat, she would look like the gray
lady I had first seen. Now, a cloak can be turned in an instant, and if
she had chosen to do this in flitting through my door I would naturally
find only a sedate, black-clothed woman passing up the street, when,
rousing from the apathy into which her appearance had thrown me, I
rushed to the front door and looked out. Had I seen such a woman? I
seemed to remember that I had. Thus much, then, was satisfactory, but to
account for her entrance into our rooms was not so easy. Had she slipped
by me in coming in as she had on going out? The parlor door was open,
for I had been out to get the paper. Could she have glided in by me
unperceived and thus have found her way into the bedroom from which I
afterward saw her issue? No, for I had stood facing the front hall door
all the time. Through the bedroom door then? But that was, as I have
said, locked. Here was a mystery, then; but it was one worth solving.

My first step was to recall all that I had heard of the actual woman who
had been buried from our rooms. Her name, as ascertained in the cheap
boarding-house to which she was traced, was Helmuth, and she was, so far
as any one knew, without friends or relatives in the city. To those who
saw her daily she was a harmless, slightly demented woman with money
enough to live above want, but not enough to warrant her boasting talk
about the rich things she was going to buy some day and the beautiful
presents she would soon be in a position to give away. The money found
on her person wa