e
housekeeper, a timid, scared-looking old woman, showed me into the
library.

I entered, overcome with conflicting emotions. I was dressed in a
narrow gown of dark serge, trimmed with black bugles. A thick green
shawl was pinned across my breast. My hands were encased with black
half-mittens worked with steel beads; on my feet were large pattens,
originally the property of my deceased grandmother. I carried a blue
cotton umbrella. As I passed before a mirror, I could not help
glancing at it, nor could I disguise from myself the fact that I was
not handsome.

Drawing a chair into a recess, I sat down with folded hands, calmly
awaiting the arrival of my master. Once or twice a fearful yell rang
through the house, or the rattling of chains, and curses uttered in a
deep, manly voice, broke upon the oppressive stillness. I began to
feel my soul rising with the emergency of the moment.

"You look alarmed, miss. You don't hear anything, my dear, do you?"
asked the housekeeper nervously.

"Nothing whatever," I remarked calmly, as a terrific scream, followed
by the dragging of chairs and tables in the room above, drowned for a
moment my reply. "It is the silence, on the contrary, which has made
me foolishly nervous."

The housekeeper looked at me approvingly, and instantly made some tea
for me.

I drank seven cups; as I was beginning the eighth, I heard a crash, and
the next moment a man leaped into the room through the broken window.

CHAPTER III.

The crash startled me from my self-control. The housekeeper bent
toward me and whispered:--

"Don't be excited. It's Mr. Rawjester,--he prefers to come in
sometimes in this way. It's his playfulness, ha! ha! ha!"

"I perceive," I said calmly. "It's the unfettered impulse of a lofty
soul breaking the tyrannizing bonds of custom." And I turned toward
him.

He had never once looked at me. He stood with his back to the fire,
which set off the herculean breadth of his shoulders. His face was
dark and expressive; his under jaw squarely formed, and remarkably
heavy. I was struck with his remarkable likeness to a Gorilla.

As he absently tied the poker into hard knots with his nervous fingers,
I watched him with some interest. Suddenly he turned toward me:--

"Do you think I'm handsome, young woman?"

"Not classically beautiful," I returned calmly; "but you have, if I may
so express myself, an abstract manliness,--a sincere and wholesome
barbarity wh