“Ah, true; I had forgotten that.”

“If we can be of any service to you, Miss Sprague,” the young man said, handing Kate back the permit, made out in Olympia’s name, which Kate had never thought of, “you can always reach us through the surgeon-general’s office.”  He handed her a card with his own and his comrade’s name in pencil.

Thanking the young man with as much self-possession as she could summon, Kate reached the carriage in a whirl of wild imaginings, more terrifying as she strove to reduce them to definite shape.  Who was this Jones?  Why remove him to Warchester?  If it were not Jack, what interest could her father have in his removal?  But. first, what could she say to Olympia?  She could say she did not know Jones, but Olympia would surely ask what questions she had put to him.  What should she say?  That he had been taken away from the hospital?  She knew Olympia well enough to know that this vague story would only incite her to further inquiry.  She would find out the father’s handiwork in the affair, and she, too, would be set on the rack of suspicion.

When the carriage reached the door, Kate dared not enter.  She dismissed the man and set out toward the green fields below the rounded slope of Meridian Hill.  Here she could breathe freely.  “I can think clearly now,” she panted, with a gush of warm tears.  If she could only remain calm, she could look Into the black abyss with the eye of reason, rather than terror.  Calmness came soothingly as she walked, and she began at the beginning, weighing probabilities.  All seemed dark and hopeless, until she came back to the record in the surgeon-general’s office.  Jones, sent from Hampton Hospital, December 13th.  This was about the time Jack had reached the Union lines.  He had left Richmond late in November.  All Brodie’s inquiries at Fort Monroe had been fruitless in finding the whereabouts of the fugitives that came through the lines at that time.  Dick had been one of them.  If Jones were not Jack himself, he must have been one of the group that escaped with Jack.  It all led back to the first frightful conjecture.  Her father was abducting a witness who could divulge Jack’s whereabouts, or he was secreting Jack until be could work him harm.  The walk began to revive Kate’s courage as well as her faculties.  She must act with energy.  The hardest part of the problem was to get clear of Olympia, for Kate at once made up her mind to quit Washington that very night for home.  She must evade Olympia’s inquiries as best she could, and make some excuse for journeying thither.

When she reached home, fortune had intervened to save her conscience from the falsehoods she feared she would have to employ.  The landlady met her in the hallway with a white face.

“O Miss Boone, Mrs. Sprague is taken very bad.  The doctor’s with her now.  I think it is typhoid fever.”

Up-stairs misfortune gave her a further release.  Olympia came into Kate’s room, agitated and in tears.