elegant a man have a house of his
own; and if he had told me it was built of marble and hung with
Florentine tapestries, I should still have credited it all. I was in
fairy-land and he was my knight of romance, even when he again hung his
head in leaving the hotel and looked at once so ordinary and
uninteresting.

"The ruse he made use of to cut off all connection between ourselves and
the Mr. and Mrs. James Pope who had registered at the Hotel D---- was
accepted by me with the same lack of suspicion. That he should wish to
carry no remembrance of our old life into our new home I thought a
delightful piece of folly, and when he proposed that we should bequeath
my gossamer and his own disfiguring duster to the coachman in whose hack
we were then riding, I laughed gleefully and helped him fold them up and
place them under the cushions, though I did wonder why he cut a piece
out of the neck of the former, and pouted with the happy freedom of a
self-confident woman when he said:

"'It is the first thing I ever bought for you, and I am just foolish
enough to wish to preserve this much of it for a keepsake. Do you
object, my dear?'

"As I was conscious of cherishing a similar folly in his regard, and
could have pressed even that old duster of his to my heart, I offered
him a kiss and said 'No,' and he put the scrap away in his pocket. That
it was the portion on which was stamped the name of the firm from which
it was bought did not occur to me.

"When the coach stopped, he urged me away on foot in a direction
entirely strange to me, saying we would take another hack as soon as we
had disposed of the bundles we were carrying. How he intended to do
this, I did not know. But presently he drew me towards a Chinese
laundry, where he bade me leave one of them as washing, and the other he
dropped before the opening of a sewer as we stepped up a neighboring
curb-stone.

"And still I did not suspect.

"Our ride to Gramercy Park was short, but during it he had time to put a
bill in my hand and tell me I was to pay the driver. He had also time to
secure the weapon upon which he had probably had his eye fixed from the
first. His manner of doing this I can never forgive, for it was a
lover's manner, and as such intended to deceive and cajole me. Drawing
my head down on his shoulder, he drew off my veil, saying that it was
the only article left of my own buying, and that we would leave it
behind us in this coach as we had left the