e same who had previously found an
unexplainable entrance into our rooms--I first inquired if the black
cloak lined with grey 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 grey side out and the effect of this heightened by a long
grey veil hung over her hat, she would look like the grey 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 parlour door was open, for I had been out to get the
paper. Could she have glided in by me unperceived and thus 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, then, was a mystery;
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 was sufficient to bury her, but no papers were in her
possession nor any letters calculated to throw light upon her past life.

Her lameness had been caused by paralysis, but the date of her attack
was not known.

Finding no clue in this to what I wished to learn, I went back to our
old rooms, which had not been let since our departure, and sought for
one there, and, strangely enough, found it. I thought I knew everything
there was to be known about the apartment we had lived in two months,
but one little fact h