roved methods of finding a missing man, would direct Mary to the
police station at the earliest practicable hour. But time had shown
that she had not done so. No, indeed! Mrs. Riley counted herself too
benevolently shrewd for that. While she had made Mary's suspense of
the night less frightful than it might have been, by surmises that
Mr. Richling had found some form of night-work,--watching some pile
of freight or some unfinished building,--she had come, secretly, to a
different conviction, predicated on her own married experiences; and if
Mr. Richling had, in a moment of gloom, tipped the bowl a little too
high, as her dear lost husband, the best man that ever walked, had often
done, and had been locked up at night to be let out in the morning, why,
give him a chance! Let him invent his own little fault-hiding romance
and come home with it. Mary was frantic. She could not be kept in; but
Mrs. Riley, by prolonged effort, convinced her it was best not to call
upon Dr. Sevier until she could be sure some disaster had actually
occurred, and sent her among the fruiterers and oystermen in vain search
for Raphael Ristofalo. Thus it was that the Doctor's morning messenger
to the Richlings, bearing word that if any one were sick he would call
without delay, was met by Mrs. Riley only, and by the reassuring
statement that both of them were out. The later messenger, from the two
men in prison, brought back word of Mary's absence from the house, of
her physical welfare, and Mrs. Riley's promise that Mary should visit
the prison at the earliest hour possible. This would not be till the
next morning.

While Mrs. Riley was sending this message, Mary, a great distance away,
was emerging from the darkening and silent streets of the river front
and moving with timid haste across the broad levee toward the edge of
the water at the steam-boat landing. In this season of depleted streams
and idle waiting, only an occasional boat lifted its lofty, black,
double funnels against the sky here and there, leaving wide stretches of
unoccupied wharf-front between. Mary hurried on, clear out to the great
wharf's edge, and looked forth upon the broad, softly moving harbor. The
low waters spread out and away, to and around the opposite point, in
wide surfaces of glassy purples and wrinkled bronze. Beauty, that joy
forever, is sometimes a terror. Was the end of her search somewhere
underneath that fearful glory? She clasped her hands, bent down with
d