did see and hear. I can only say that
on that night of the twentieth of December, 1860, the same on which, as
it afterward appeared, the ordinance of secession was adopted at
Charleston, I, in the little old two-story house in the Rue la Reynie
Ogniard, witnessed what I have related.

"I left Havre in the old Arago only a fortnight afterwards. Perhaps the
incident helped to drive me home. At all events I was ashamed to remain
abroad when the country was in danger. Now you know quite as much of the
affair as myself--which is not saying much!"

"Ugh!" said Harding, drawing an evident sigh of relief at the conclusion
of so long a story, which had yet been so absorbingly interesting to
him, under the circumstances, that he could not go to sleep in the midst
of it--"Ugh! your idea--I beg your pardon!--your _relation_ of the great
yellow worms and their affinity to shoulder-straps, is almost enough to
make a man, however patriotic, shudder at the thought of assuming such a
decoration."

"I believe you, my boy!" said Leslie, quoting an expressive vulgarism
which Orpheus C. Kerr had just been making so extensively popular.

"And that female combination of ghastly red and magical knowledge--"

"That remarkable combination," said Leslie, anticipating and
interrupting the half-sneer that was coming--"is the red woman whom I
saw to-night in the house on Prince Street, just before I fell out of
the tree; and it was her voice that I heard on the piazza yonder just
before the door opened. What do you think of it?"

"Think?" said Harding, earnestly this time. "I am altogether too much
wrapped in that remarkable white mist that you have been shaking round
me, to _think_! Then the events of to-night--so much crowded in a little
space, and that woman coming into the midst of it all! My life has been
a rather plain one, so far, and I have had to do with very few
mysteries; but here I am tumbling into the midst of one thicker than the
fog on the East River in a February thaw!"

"And yet the mystery of the two houses, and of the red woman so far as
possible, I am going to go through like the proverbial streak of
lightning through a gooseberry-bush, before I have done with it!" said
Leslie, his habitual good opinion of his own powers coming once more
into play. "You are ready to go with me?"

"All the way!" said Harding, graphically; and it was then that after a
few words of arrangement the two friends parted, to catch what might
st