an understand a man, aye, or a
woman either, risking happiness and fame, life and death, for the sake
of a trust! Such things are not folly to you! You could see a heart
spill itself drop by drop through a longer vigil than the eight months
watching on the ramparts, and not sneer at a fidelity that could not
falter because it had given its word? Speak; you write of faithfulness
with a pen of fire, is your heart faithful too?"

There was something in these words, spoken as they were in a tone of
suppressed passion, that startled and aroused Paula. Leaning forward,
she endeavored to see the face of the woman who thus forcibly addressed
her, but the light was too dim. The outline of a brow covered by some
close headgear was all she could detect.

"You speak earnestly," said Paula, "but that is what I like. Fidelity to
a cause, or fidelity to a trust, demands the sympathy and admiration of
all honest and generous hearts. If I am ever called upon to maintain
either, I hope that my enthusiasm will not have all been expended in
words."

"You please me," murmured the woman, "you please me; will you come and
see me and let me tell you a story to mate the poem you have given us
to-night?"

The trembling eagerness of her tone it would be impossible to describe.
Paula was thrilled by it. "If you will tell me who you are," said Paula,
"I certainly will try and come. I should be glad to hear anything you
have to relate to me."

"I thought every one knew who I was," returned the woman; and drawing
Paula back into the ante-room, she turned her face upon her. "Any one
will tell you where Margery Hamlin lives," said she. "Do not disappoint
me, and do not keep me waiting long." And with a nod and a deep strange
smile that made her aged face almost youthful, she entered the crowd and
disappeared from Paula's sight.

It was the woman whose nightly visits to the deserted home of the Japhas
had once been the talk and was still the unsolved mystery of the town.

XXIV.

THE JAPHA MANSION.

"Ah what a warning for a thoughtless man,
Could field or grove, could any spot on earth
Show to his eye an image of the pangs
Which it has witnessed; render back an echo
Of the sad steps by which it hath been trod.

--WORDSWORTH.

Unexplained actions if long continued, lose after awhile their interest
if not their mystery. The aged lady who now for many years had been seen
at every night-fall to leave her home,