sh Bell Crawford accompanied her up-stairs; and
the moment after, Tom Leslie stepped into the office-door through which
he had seen Dexter Ralston disappear. He was not there. In reply to an
inquiry, the clerk said that a tall man, whom he had seen several times
before, had come into the room and stepped to the counter a moment,
perhaps to examine the register, but that he had almost instantly gone
out again. Leslie looked through the halls and upon the piazza, a little
perplexed by the sudden appearances and disappearances of this man; but
he was not in sight anywhere--he had evidently left the house.

Before quitting the breakfast-table, it had been arranged that the whole
reinforced party should use the fine morning for a ride over the bridge
into Canada, a three-seated carriage being called into requisition. But
after the gentlemen had waited a few moments for tidings from the sudden
invalid, Bell Crawford came down-stairs again and announced that they
would be obliged to take the ride without female company, as Miss Hobart
felt too much indisposed to ride and would remain in her room, and she
could not think of leaving her entirely alone in a strange house on the
first day of their arrival. Marion, she said, had proclaimed her
willingness to remain alone, and had even urged her to go, but she had
refused and would remain.

This arrangement did not precisely please any of the gentlemen, and
least of all it pleased Walter Lane Harding, who had lately ridden over
all that ground quite often enough unless he was to go over it this time
in peculiarly pleasant company. He had an insane belief, by this time,
that Miss Bell Crawford was "very pleasant company." But there was
little else to do, than to obey the decrees of fate; one of the ladies
was temporarily an invalid, and the other, for humanity's sake, must
play nurse; the gentlemen could have little of their society, at least
for the morning; and so half an hour afterwards, while Bell Crawford
returned up-stairs, fortified with a novel and two Buffalo papers, to
perform her self-denying office of Good Samaritan, the four gentlemen
took an open landau and were whirled down to the Suspension Bridge and
over to the Canada side.

Their drive had lasted perhaps three hours and covered nearly twenty
miles, when, hastening back to dinner, they drove in at the gate-house
on the Canada side of the Suspension Bridge. A close-carriage was just
leaving the bridge at the same m