rtle's tastes and ways of thinking and of life, so
that, by and by, when she should look upon herself as a young woman,
and not as a girl, he would have a great advantage in making her more
intimate acquaintance.

Thus, she corresponded with a friend of her mother's in India. She
talked at times as if it were her ideal home, and showed many tastes
which might well be vestiges of early Oriental impressions. She made
herself a rude hammock,--such as are often used in hot climates,--and
swung it between two elms. Here she would lie in the hot summer days,
and fan herself with the sandal-wood fan her friend in India had sent
her,--the perfume of which, the women said, seemed to throw her into
day-dreams, which were almost like trances.

These circumstances gave a general direction to his ideas, which were
presently fixed more exactly by two circumstances which he learned for
himself and kept to himself; for he had no idea of making a hue and cry,
and yet he did not mean that Myrtle Hazard should get away if he could
help it.

The first fact was this. He found among the copies of the city newspaper
they took at The Poplars a recent number from which a square had been
cut out. He procured another copy of this paper of the same date, and
found that the piece cut out was an advertisement to the effect that
the A 1 Ship Swordfish, Captain Hawkins, was to sail from Boston for
Calcutta, on the 20th of June.

The second fact was the following. On the window-sill of her little
hanging chamber, which the women allowed him to inspect, he found some
threads of long, black, glossy hair caught by a splinter in the wood.
They were Myrtle's of course. A simpleton might have constructed a
tragedy out of this trivial circumstance,--how she had cast herself
from the window into the waters beneath it,--how she had been thrust out
after a struggle, of which this shred from her tresses was the dreadful
witness,--and so on. Murray Bradshaw did not stop to guess and wonder.
He said nothing about it, but wound the shining threads on his finger,
and, as soon as he got home, examined them with a magnifier. They had
been cut off smoothly, as with a pair of scissors. This was part of a
mass of hair, then, which had been shorn and thrown from the window.
Nobody would do that but she herself. What would she do it for? To
disguise her sex, of course. The other inferences were plain enough.

The wily young man put all these facts and hints together, a