This might be ANN, they thought, but to make sure, they telegraphed to six different stations, promising a small reward in case their pursuit was successful.  In due time the answers came, all very much alike, and to the effect that a woman, answering their description, was seen to take such and such a train, and that the reward would reach them at the following address, etc.; at which they went home rather discouraged, to see what ARCHIBALD had accomplished.

He said he went to the Half-way House, and questioned Mrs. BACKUP and TEDDY for four hours, without finding out the first thing.  “You’re a numskull,” said BELINDA.  “If I hadn’t got any more brains than you have, I’d swap myself off for a dog, and then kill the dog.”

“I don’t believe the folks there would tell, anyhow,” said the Hon. MICHAEL; “she’s probably hired ’em to keep mum.”

Now the fact was, ARCHIBALD hadn’t been near the Half-way House at all.  There wasn’t money enough in the State to hire him to do so, after the fearful ordeal he had there passed through.  So he hid in the woods all day, and rehearsed this terrible falsehood, making himself miserable by repeating those extracts from the catechism which refer to the future abode of liars.

Though thus foiled in their active investigations, they still held long consultations on the absorbing topic, and in which, to ARCHIBALD’S horror, he is often obliged to participate.  He has had it on his tongue’s end forty times to tell BELINDA all about his forced marriage with ANN at the Half-way House.  He has even dreamed, on two separate nights, that he has done so, but he woke up both times in a cold, clammy sort of ooze, and it has naturally shaken his confidence, and so the words stick in his throat.  And he remembers ANN’S horrible threat of coming for him when she wants him, and he makes it a point of doing all his out-door business before dark, and the bare mention of her name will make him start and glare wildly about him.  And still BELINDA courts him more persistently than ever, and it is a scene calculated to touch the most rugged nature to watch them together, she smoothing his hair, and calling him her “Tootsy-pootsy,” or reading poetry to him, stopping between each verse to cast languishing glances at him, and he bearing it all with that haggard, imbecile look peculiar to an over-courted man.  And as their wedding-day approaches is it any wonder that poor ARCHIBALD looks forward to it as a condemned criminal to the scaffold, and watches day by day the setting of the sun with the same air of grim despair.  Once he tried to run away, but BELINDA, in ambush, flanked him and led him home.  Then she sent for his trunk, and made him board there.  And so he is floating along in a hopeless sort of daze, a wretched victim of diabolical circumstances.