, and gradually
moved forward. He made another step. He was going away. He had almost
reached the door, when Miss Eunice articulated, in a confused whisper,
"My--my glove; I wish you would give me my glove."

He stopped, fixed his eyes upon her, and after passing his fingers up
and down upon the outside of his coat, said, with deliberation, in a
husky voice, "No, mum. I'm goin' fur to keep it as long as I live, if it
takes two thousand years."

"Keep it!" she stammered.

"Keep it," he replied.

He gave her an untranslatable look. It neither frightened her nor
permitted her to demand the glove more emphatically. She felt her cheeks
and temples and her hands grow cold, and midway in the process of
fainting she saw him disappear. He vanished quietly. Deliberation and
respect characterized his movements, and there was not so much as a jar
of the outer door.

Poor philanthropist!

This incident nearly sent her to a sick-bed. She fully expected that her
secret would appear in the newspapers in full, and she lived in dread of
the onslaught of an angry and outraged society.

The more she reflected upon what her possibilities had been and how she
had misused them, the iller and the more distressed she got. She grew
thin and spare of flesh. Her friends became frightened. They began to
dose her and to coddle her. She looked at them with eyes full of supreme
melancholy, and she frequently wept upon their shoulders.

In spite of her precautions, however, a thunder-bolt slipped in.

One day her father read at the table an item that met his eye. He
repeated it aloud, on account of the peculiar statement in the last
line:

"Detained on suspicion.--A rough-looking fellow, who gave the name of
Gorman, was arrested on the high-road to Tuxbridge Springs for suspected
complicity in some recent robberies in the neighborhood. He was
fortunately able to give a pretty clear account of his late whereabouts
and he was permitted to depart with a caution from the justice. Nothing
was found upon him but a few coppers and an old kid glove wrapped in a
bit of paper."

Miss Eunice's soup spilled. This was too much, and she fainted this time
in right good earnest; and she straightway became an invalid of the
settled type. They put her to bed. The doctor told her plainly that he
knew she had a secret, but she looked at him so imploringly that he
refrained from telling his fancies; but he ordered an immediate change
of air. It was settled a