“If her husband says to me that he wants it back, well and good,” she said, “but I don’t give it up to nobody but him.  Some folks I know of would be glad enough to have it.”

I was certain it was Jennie Brice’s coat, but the maker’s name had been ripped out.  With Molly holding one arm and I the other, we took it to Mr. Ladley’s door and knocked.  He opened it, grumbling.

“I have asked you not to interrupt me,” he said, with his pen in his hand.  His eyes fell on the coat.  “What’s that?” he asked, changing color.

“I think it’s Mrs. Ladley’s fur coat,” I said.

He stood there looking at it and thinking.  Then:  “It can’t be hers,” he said.  “She wore hers when she went away.”

“Perhaps she dropped it in the water.”

He looked at me and smiled.  “And why would she do that?” he asked mockingly.  “Was it out of fashion?”

“That’s Mrs. Ladley’s coat,” I persisted, but Molly Maguire jerked it from me and started away.  He stood there looking at me and smiling in his nasty way.

“This excitement is telling on you, Mrs. Pitman,” he said coolly.  “You’re too emotional for detective work.”  Then he went in and shut the door.

When I went down-stairs, Molly Maguire was waiting in the kitchen, and had the audacity to ask me if I thought the coat needed a new lining!

It was on Monday evening that the strangest event in years happened to me.  I went to my sister’s house!  And the fact that I was admitted at a side entrance made it even stranger.  It happened in this way: 

Supper was over, and I was cleaning up, when an automobile came to the door.  It was Alma’s car.  The chauffeur gave me a note: 

“DEAR MRS PITMAN—­I am not at all well, and very anxious.  Will you come to see me at once?  My mother is out to dinner, and I am alone.  The car will bring you.  Cordially, “LIDA HARVEY.”

I put on my best dress at once and got into the limousine.  Half the neighborhood was out watching.  I leaned back in the upholstered seat, fairly quivering with excitement.  This was Alma’s car; that was Alma’s card-case; the little clock had her monogram on it.  Even the flowers in the flower holder, yellow tulips, reminded me of Alma—­a trifle showy, but good to look at!  And I was going to her house!

I was not taken to the main entrance, but to a side door.  The queer dream-like feeling was still there.  In this back hall, relegated from the more conspicuous part of the house, there were even pieces of furniture from the old home, and my father’s picture, in an oval gilt frame, hung over my head.  I had not seen a picture of him for twenty years.  I went over and touched it gently.

“Father, father!” I said.

Under it was the tall hall chair that I had climbed over as a child, and had stood on many times, to see myself in the mirror above.  The chair was newly finished and looked the better for its age.  I glanced in the old glass.  The chair had stood time better than I. I was a middle-aged woman, lined with poverty and care, shabby, prematurely gray, a little hard.  I had thought my father an old man when that picture was taken, and now I was even older.  “Father!” I whispered again, and fell to crying in the dimly lighted hall.