eral, with its pomp and ceremony, but I
shrank from a death-bed. However, Liddy got out the black things and
the crape veil I keep for such occasions, and I went. I left Mr.
Jamieson and the day detective going over every inch of the circular
staircase, pounding, probing and measuring. I was inwardly elated to
think of the surprise I was going to give them that night; as it turned
out, I DID surprise them almost into spasms.

I drove from the train to the Charity Hospital, and was at once taken
to a ward. There, in a gray-walled room in a high iron bed, lay Mrs.
Watson. She was very weak, and she only opened her eyes and looked at
me when I sat down beside her. I was conscience-stricken. We had been
so engrossed that I had left this poor creature to die without even a
word of sympathy.

The nurse gave her a stimulant, and in a little while she was able to
talk. So broken and half-coherent, however, was her story that I shall
tell it in my own way. In an hour from the time I entered the Charity
Hospital, I had heard a sad and pitiful narrative, and had seen a woman
slip into the unconsciousness that is only a step from death.

Briefly, then, the housekeeper's story was this:

She was almost forty years old, and had been the sister-mother of a
large family of children. One by one they had died, and been buried
beside their parents in a little town in the Middle West. There was
only one sister left, the baby, Lucy. On her the older girl had
lavished all the love of an impulsive and emotional nature. When Anne,
the elder, was thirty-two and Lucy was nineteen, a young man had come
to the town. He was going east, after spending the summer at a
celebrated ranch in Wyoming--one of those places where wealthy men send
worthless and dissipated sons, for a season of temperance, fresh air
and hunting. The sisters, of course, knew nothing of this, and the
young man's ardor rather carried them away. In a word, seven years
before, Lucy Haswell had married a young man whose name was given as
Aubrey Wallace.

Anne Haswell had married a carpenter in her native town, and was a
widow. For three months everything went fairly well. Aubrey took his
bride to Chicago, where they lived at a hotel. Perhaps the very
unsophistication that had charmed him in Valley Mill jarred on him in
the city. He had been far from a model husband, even for the three
months, and when he disappeared Anne was almost thankful. It was
different