race but had possessed some marked peculiarity.  His father, bibliomaniac though he was, would never treat a man or a woman with decency, who mentioned Shakspeare to him, nor would he acknowledge to his dying day any excellence in that divine poet beyond a happy way of putting words together.  Mr. Blake’s uncle hated all members of the legal profession, and as for his grandfather—­but you have heard what a mania of dislike he had against that simple article of diet, fish; now his friends were obliged to omit it from their bills of fare whenever they expected him to dinner.  If then Mr. Blake chose to have any pet antipathy—­as for women for instance—­he surely had precedent enough in his own family to back him.  However, it was whispered in my ear by one gentleman, a former political colleague of his who had been with him in Washington, that he was known at one time to show considerable attention to Miss Evelyn Blake, that cousin of his who has since made such a brilliant thing of it by marrying, and straightway losing by death, a wealthy old scapegrace of a French noble, the Count De Mirac.  But that was not a matter to be talked about, Madame the Countess being free at present and in New York, though to all appearance upon anything but pleasant terms with her quondam admirer.

Remembering the picture I had seen in Mr. Blake’s private apartment, I asked if this lady was a brunette, and being told she was, and of the most pronounced type, felt for the moment I had stumbled upon something in the shape of a clue; but upon resorting to Mr. Gryce with my information, he shook his head with a short laugh and told me I would have to dive deeper than that if I wanted to fish up the truth lying at the bottom of this well.

CHAPTER V

A NEW YORK BELLE

Meanwhile all our efforts to obtain information in regard to the fate or whereabouts of the missing girl, had so far proved utterly futile.  Even the advertisements inserted by Mrs. Daniels had produced no effect; and frustrated in my scheme I began to despair, when the accounts of that same Mrs. Daniels’ strange and unaccountable behavior during these days of suspense, which came to me through Fanny, (the pretty housemaid at Mr. Blake’s, whose acquaintance I had lately taken to cultivating,) aroused once more my dormant energies and led me to ask myself if the affair was quite as hopeless as it seemed.

“If she was a ghost,” was her final expression on the subject, “she could’nt go peramberlating this house more than she does.  It seems as if she could’nt keep still a minute.  Upstairs and down, upstairs and down, till we’re most wild.  And so white as she is and so trembling!  Why her hands shake so all the time she never dares lift a dish off the table.  And then the way she hangs about Mr. Blake’s door when he’s at home!  She never goes in, that’s the oddest part of it, but walks up and down before it, wringing