g men
of Camden, and flirt with them, too--especially with Harry Clifford,
who, she found, had been in college with Frank Van Buren. Harry Clifford
was a fast young man, but pleasant to talk with for a while and Ethelyn
found him very agreeable, saving that his mention of Frank made her
heart throb unpleasantly; for she fancied he might know something of
that page of her past life which she had concealed from Richard. Nor
were her fears without foundation, for once when they were standing
together near her husband, Harry said:

"It seems so strange that you are the Ethie about whom Frank used to
talk so much, and a lock of whose hair he kept so sacred. I remember I
tried to buy a part of it from him, but could not succeed until once,
when his funds from home failed to come, and he was so hard up, as we
used to say, that he actually sold, or rather pawned, half of the
shining tress for the sum of five dollars. As the pawn was never
redeemed, I have the hair now, but never expected to meet with its fair
owner, who needs not to be told that the tress is tenfold more valuable
since I have met her, and know her to be the wife of our esteemed
Member," and young Clifford bowed toward Richard, whose face wore a
perplexed, dissatisfied expression.

He did not fancy Harry Clifford much, and he certainly did not care to
hear that he had in his possession a lock of Ethelyn's hair, while the
allusions to Frank Van Buren were anything but agreeable to him. Neither
did he like Ethelyn's painful blushes, and her evident desire for Harry
to stop. It looked as if the hair business meant more than he would like
to suppose. Naturally bright and quick, young Clifford detected
Richard's thoughts, and directly began to wonder if there were not
something somewhere which Judge Markham did not understand.

"I mean to find out," he thought, and watching an opportunity, when
Ethelyn was comparatively alone, he crossed to her side and said in a
low tone, "Excuse me, Mrs. Markham. If in my illusions to Frank Van
Buren I touched a subject which has never been discussed between
yourself and your husband, I meant no harm, I assure you."

Instead of rebuking the impertinent young man, Ethelyn turned very red,
and stammered out something about its being of no consequence; and so
Harry Clifford held the secret which she had kept so carefully from
Richard, and that party in Camden was made the stepping-stone to much of
the wretchedness that afterward c