ing out Mrs. Prest
of course.

She hesitated; I thought she was perhaps going to say that we had been
very base. But she remarked after a moment, in a candid, wondering way,
"How much you must want them!"

"Oh, I do, passionately!" I conceded, smiling. And this chance made
me go on, forgetting my compunction of a moment before. "How can she
possibly have changed their place herself? How can she walk? How can
she arrive at that sort of muscular exertion? How can she lift and carry
things?"

"Oh, when one wants and when one has so much will!" said Miss Tita, as
if she had thought over my question already herself and had simply had
no choice but that answer--the idea that in the dead of night, or at
some moment when the coast was clear, the old woman had been capable of
a miraculous effort.

"Have you questioned Olimpia? Hasn't she helped her--hasn't she done it
for her?" I asked; to which Miss Tita replied promptly and positively
that their servant had had nothing to do with the matter, though without
admitting definitely that she had spoken to her. It was as if she were
a little shy, a little ashamed now of letting me see how much she had
entered into my uneasiness and had me on her mind. Suddenly she said to
me, without any immediate relevance:

"I feel as if you were a new person, now that you have got a new name."

"It isn't a new one; it is a very good old one, thank heaven!"

She looked at me a moment. "I do like it better."

"Oh, if you didn't I would almost go on with the other!"

"Would you really?"

I laughed again, but for all answer to this inquiry I said, "Of course
if she can rummage about that way she can perfectly have burnt them."

"You must wait--you must wait," Miss Tita moralized mournfully; and her
tone ministered little to my patience, for it seemed after all to accept
that wretched possibility. I would teach myself to wait, I declared
nevertheless; because in the first place I could not do otherwise and in
the second I had her promise, given me the other night, that she would
help me.

"Of course if the papers are gone that's no use," she said; not as if
she wished to recede, but only to be conscientious.

"Naturally. But if you could only find out!" I groaned, quivering again.

"I thought you said you would wait."

"Oh, you mean wait even for that?"

"For what then?"

"Oh, nothing," I replied, rather foolishly, being ashamed to tell her
what had been implied in my submission t