e I was thought to be
with her at the Hotel D----, a fact which greatly hampered me, as you
can see, when I was requested by the police to give an account of how I
spent that day. When I left her it was to seek my brother. She had told
me of her deliberate intention of spending the night in the Gramercy
Park house; and as I saw no way of her doing this without my brother's
connivance, I started in search of him, meaning to stick to him when I
found him, and keep him away from her till that night was over. I was
not successful in my undertaking. He was locked in his rooms it seems,
packing up his effects for flight,--we always had the same instincts
even when boys,--and receiving no answer to my knock, I hastened away to
Gramercy Park to keep a watch over the house against my brother coming
there. This was early in the evening, and for hours afterwards I
wandered like a restless spirit in and out of those streets, meeting no
one I knew, not even my brother, though he was wandering about in very
much the same manner, and with very much the same apprehensions.

"The duplicity of the woman became very evident to me the next morning.
In my last interview with her she had shown no relenting in her purpose
towards me, but when I entered my office after this restless night in
the streets, I found lying on my desk her little hand-bag, which had
been sent down from Mrs. Parker's. In it was _the letter_, just as you
divined, Miss Butterworth. I had hardly got over the shock of this most
unexpected good fortune when the news came that a woman had been found
dead in my father's house. What was I to think? That it was she, of
course, and that my brother had been the man to let her in there. Miss
Butterworth," this is how he ended, "I make no demands upon you, as I
have made no demands upon the police, to keep the secret contained in
that letter from my much-abused brother. Or, rather, it is too late now
to keep it, for I have told him all there was to tell, myself, and he
has seen fit to overlook my fault, and to regard me with even more
affection than he did before this dreadful tragedy came to harrow up our
lives."

Do you wonder I like Franklin Van Burnam?

The Misses Van Burnam call upon me regularly, and when they say "_Dear
old thing!_" now, they mean it.

Of Miss Althorpe I cannot trust myself to speak. She was, and is, the
finest woman I know, and when the great shadow now hanging over her has
lost some of its impenetrabi