and was suffering from a
bad headache, which last reason was her excuse for not seeing company.

He called again, the following day, and learned that Miss Hazard had
just left the city, and gone on a visit to Oxbow Village:

CHAPTER XXVII. MINE AND COUNTERMINE.

What the nature of the telegram was which had produced such an effect on
the feelings and plans of Mr. William Murray Bradshaw nobody especially
interested knew but himself. We may conjecture that it announced some
fact, which had leaked out a little prematurely, relating to the issue
of the great land-case in which the firm was interested. However that
might be, Mr. Bradshaw no sooner heard that Myrtle had suddenly left
the city for Oxbow Village,--for what reason he puzzled himself to
guess,--than he determined to follow her at once, and take up the
conversation he had begun at the party where it left off. And as the
young poet had received his quietus for the present at the publisher's,
and as Master Gridley had nothing specially to detain him, they too
returned at about the same time, and so our old acquaintances were
once more together within the familiar precincts where we have been
accustomed to see them.

Master Gridley did not like playing the part of a spy, but it must be
remembered that he was an old college officer, and had something of the
detective's sagacity, and a certain cunning derived from the habit of
keeping an eye on mischievous students. If any underhand contrivance was
at work, involving the welfare of any one in whom he was interested, he
was a dangerous person for the plotters, for he had plenty of time to
attend to them, and would be apt to take a kind of pleasure in matching
his wits against another crafty person's,--such a one, for instance, as
Mr. Macchiavelli Bradshaw.

Perhaps he caught some words of that gentleman's conversation at the
party; at any rate, he could not fail to observe his manner. When he
found that the young man had followed Myrtle back to the village, he
suspected something more than a coincidence. When he learned that he was
assiduously visiting The Poplars, and that he was in close communication
with Miss Cynthia Badlam, he felt sure that he was pressing the siege
of Myrtle's heart. But that there was some difficulty in the way was
equally clear to him, for he ascertained, through channels which the
attentive reader will soon have means of conjecturing, that Myrtle had
seen him but once in the week f