u learned?"

"No."

"Why?"

"She didn't give me the chance."

"Oh!"

"I know it sounds queer, Miss, but it's true. She didn't give me a
chance to talk."

He muttered the final sentence. Indeed, all that we had said until now
had been in a subdued tone, but now my voice unconsciously rose.

"You found Mr. Steele?"

"No, Miss, he was not at home."

"But they told you where to look for him?"

"No. His landlady thinks he is dead. He has queer spells, and some one
had sent her word about a man, handsome like him, who was found dead at
Hudson Three Corners last night. Mr. Steele told her he was going over
to Hudson Three Corners. She has sent to see if the dead man is he."

"The dead man!"

Who spoke? Not Mrs. Packard! Surely that voice was another's. Yet we
both looked up to see:

The sight which met our eyes was astonishing, appalling. She had let her
baby slip to the floor and had advanced to the stairs, where she stood,
clutching at the rail, looking down upon us, with a joy in her face
matching the unholy elation we could still hear ringing in that word
"dead."

Such a look might have leaped to life in the eyes of the Medusa when she
turned her beauty upon her foredoomed victims.

"Dead!" came again in ringing repetition from Mrs. Packard's lips, every
fiber in her tense form quivering and the gleam of hope shining brighter
and brighter in her countenance. "No, not dead!" Then while Nixon
trembled and succumbed inwardly to this spectacle of a gentle-hearted
woman transformed by some secret and overwhelming emotion into an image
of vindictive delight, her hands left the stair-rail and flew straight
up over her head in the transcendent gesture which only the greatest
crises in life call forth, and she exclaimed with awe-inspiring
emphasis: "God could not have been so merciful!"

It is not often, perhaps it is only once in a lifetime, that it is given
us to look straight into the innermost recesses of the human soul. Never
before had such an opportunity come to me, and possibly never would
it come again, yet my first conscious impulse was one of fright at the
appalling self-revelation she had made, not only in my hearing, but in
that of nearly her whole household. I could see, over her shoulders,
Letty's eyes staring wide in ingenuous dismay, while from the hall below
rose the sound of hurrying feet as the girls came running in from the
kitchen. Something must be done, and immediately, to recall her to