nstraining force of the
look which awaited me. I knew afterward that it was a man whom I had
seen, a man whom you yourself had introduced into the house; but at the
instant I thought it a phantom of my forgotten past sent to shock and
destroy me; and, struck speechless with the horror of it, I lost
that opportunity of mutual explanation which might have saved me an
unnecessary and cruel experience. For this man, who recognized me more
surely than I did him, who perhaps knew who I was before he ever entered
my house, has sported for two weeks with my fears and hopes as a tiger
with his prey. Maintaining his attitude of stranger--you have been
witness to his manner in my presence--he led me slowly but surely to
believe myself deceived by an extraordinary resemblance; a resemblance,
moreover, which did not hold at all times, and which frequently vanished
altogether, as I recalled the straight-featured but often uncouth aspect
of the man who had awakened the admiration of Boone. Memory had been
awakened and my sleep filled with dreams, but the unendurable had been
spared me and I was thanking God with my whole heart, when suddenly one
night, when an evening spent with friends in the old way had made me
feel safe, my love safe, my husband and my child safe, there came to my
ears from below the sound of a laugh, loud, coarse and deriding,--such
a laugh as could spring from no member of my own household, such a laugh
as I heard but once before and that in the by-gone years when some one
asked Mr. Brainard if he meant to live always in Boone. The shock was
terrible, and when I learned that the secretary, and the secretary only,
was below, I knew who that secretary was and yielded to the blow.

"Yet hope dies hard with the happy. I knew, but it was not enough to
know,--I must be sure. There was a way--it came to me with my first
fluttering breath as I recovered from my faint. In those old days when
I was thrown much with this man, he had shown me a curious cipher and
taught me how to use it. It was original with himself, he said, and some
day we might be glad of a method of communication which would render our
correspondence inviolable. I could not see why he considered this likely
ever to be desirable, but I took the description of it which he gave me
and promised that I would never let it leave my person. I even allowed
him to solder about my neck the chain which held the locket in which he
had placed it. Consequently I had it