ries up and down the San Luis and shots were heard
around the nearest corner, Maid Marion, Second, was found crouching upon
the cane-bottomed chair that had baffled her plans, half-laughing,
half-crying with vexation, but firmly grasping in one hand a tuft of
coarse, straight black hair, and in the other a section of Filipino
shirt the size of a lady's kerchief--all she had to show of her
predatory visitor and to account for the unseemly disturbance they had
made.

"Just to think--just to think!" exclaimed Mrs. Brent, with clasping
hands, "that this time, when you might most have needed it, Mr.
Stuyvesant should have gone off with your pistol!"

CHAPTER XV.

But there was little merriment when, five minutes later, the household
had taken account of stock and realized the extent of their losses.

Maidie's had evidently been the last room visited. The dressing-table
and wardrobe of the opposite chamber--that occupied by Colonel and Mrs.
Brent--had been ransacked. The colonel's watch and chain,--too bulky, he
said, to be worn at dinner in white uniform,--his Loyal Legion and Army
of the Potomac insignia, and some prized though not expensive trinkets
of his good wife were gone. Miss Porter's little purse with her modest
savings and a brooch that had been her mother's were missing. And with
these items the skilled practitioner had made good his escape.

On the floor, just under the window in Maidie's room, lay a keen,
double-edged knife. The stumps of two or three matches found in the
colonel's apartment and others in Miss Porter's showed that the thief
had not feared to make sufficient light for his purpose, and from the
floor of Marion's room, close to the bureau, just where it had been
dropped when the prowler was alarmed, Miss Porter picked up one of the
old-fashioned "phosphors" that ignite noiselessly and burn with but a
tiny flame.

Marion's porte-monnaie was in the upper drawer, untouched, and such
jewelry as she owned, save two precious rings she always wore, was
stored in her father's safe deposit box in the bank at home. The colonel
was really the greatest loser and declared it served him right, both
provost-marshal and chief of police having warned him to leave nothing
"lying around loose."

At sound of the shots on the Calle Nueva, Brent had sallied forth, and,
rushing impetuously into the dimly lighted thoroughfare, had narrowly
missed losing the top of his head as well as his watch, an excited