He went away that night, and I must admit I missed him.  I rented the parlor bedroom the next day to a school-teacher, and I found the periscope affair very handy.  I could see just how much gas she used; and although the notice on each door forbids cooking and washing in rooms, I found she was doing both:  making coffee and boiling an egg in the morning, and rubbing out stockings and handkerchiefs in her wash-bowl.  I’d much rather have men as boarders than women.  The women are always lighting alcohol lamps on the bureau, and wanting the bed turned into a cozy corner so they can see their gentlemen friends in their rooms.

Well, with Mr. Holcombe gone, and Mr. Reynolds busy all day and half the night getting out the summer silks and preparing for remnant day, and with Mr. Ladley in jail and Lida out of the city—­for I saw in the papers that she was not well, and her mother had taken her to Bermuda—­I had a good bit of time on my hands.  And so I got in the habit of thinking things over, and trying to draw conclusions, as I had seen Mr. Holcombe do.  I would sit down and write things out as they had happened, and study them over, and especially I worried over how we could have found a slip of paper in Mr. Ladley’s room with a list, almost exact, of the things we had discovered there.  I used to read it over, “rope, knife, shoe, towel, Horn—­” and get more and more bewildered.  “Horn”—­might have been a town, or it might not have been.  There was such a town, according to Mr. Graves, but apparently he had made nothing of it. Was it a town that was meant?

The dictionary gave only a few words beginning with “horn”—­hornet, hornblende, hornpipe, and horny—­none of which was of any assistance.  And then one morning I happened to see in the personal column of one of the newspapers that a woman named Eliza Shaeffer, of Horner, had day-old Buff Orpington and Plymouth Rock chicks for sale, and it started me to puzzling again.  Perhaps it had been Horner, and possibly this very Eliza Shaeffer—­

I suppose my lack of experience was in my favor, for, after all, Eliza Shaeffer is a common enough name, and the “Horn” might have stood for “hornswoggle,” for all I knew.  The story of the man who thought of what he would do if he were a horse, came back to me, and for an hour or so I tried to think I was Jennie Brice, trying to get away and hide from my rascal of a husband.  But I made no headway.  I would never have gone to Horner, or to any small town, if I had wanted to hide.  I think I should have gone around the corner and taken a room in my own neighborhood, or have lost myself in some large city.

It was that same day that, since I did not go to Horner, Horner came to me.  The bell rang about three o’clock, and I answered it myself.  For, with times hard and only two or three roomers all winter, I had not had a servant, except Terry to do odd jobs, for some months.

There stood a fresh-faced young girl, with a covered basket in her hand.