al and unexplained disappearance had not, indeed, been
closely kept. His intimate friends, his household servants and the
public officials knew it, but the general public did not.

The next morning the news came out, and the papers had sensational
head-lines and long accounts of the sudden and mysterious disappearance
of the governor-elect on the eve of his inauguration and of a bridegroom
on the evening of his wedding day.

Also there were rewards offered for any intelligence of Regulas Rothsay,
living or dead, and for the identification of the unknown visitor who
was supposed to have been the last to have seen him on the night of his
disappearance.

Days passed, and nothing came in answer to the advertisements. The
public at length reached in theory this conclusion: that the
governor-elect had been decoyed from the house by his latest visitor,
and had been secretly murdered in some remote quarter.

The Rockharrts did not return to Rockhold, but remained in town through
all the heat of that hot summer, because Aaron Rockharrt thought he
could best pursue his investigations on the scene of the mystery. But he
sent his sons to North End to look after the works.

Corona would see no one save the members of her own family. She kept her
room, and grieved without ceasing. On the ninth day after the
disappearance of her lover-husband she made an effort and came down into
the drawing room, to please the gentle old grandmother.

She sat there with the old lady, reading to her, until Mrs. Rockharrt
was called out by her tyrant to get something, it might be a book or a
paper, a cigar or a pipe, that he himself or a servant might have got
just as well, except that Aaron Rockharrt liked to have the ladies of
his family wait upon him.

What happened during the hour of the old lady's absence from the drawing
room no one knew, but when she returned she found her granddaughter in a
swoon on the carpet. In great alarm she called the servants to her
assistance. The unconscious girl was laid upon a sofa, and all means
were taken to restore her to her senses. Corona recovered her faculties
only to fall into the most violent paroxysms of anguish and despair.

From her ravings and self-reproaches Mrs. Rockharrt gathered that the
unfortunate girl had heard, or in some way learned, some fatal news.

She sent all the servants out of the room, locked the door, administered
a sedative to her child, and then, when the latter was somewhat