It was nothing less than a widow’s costume, comprising a dress, bonnet, and vail, together with a wig of short, curling red hair!

Yes, Mrs. Montague was the “widow!” or woman in black whom Detective Rider had observed and followed only a little while previous.  When she found that the man was on her track she had slipped into the carriage and ordered the driver to take her with all possible speed to a certain store on Broadway.  Arriving there, she had simply passed in at one door and out of one opposite leading upon a side street, where she hailed a car, and, thoroughly alarmed, went directly home instead of going to the room where she usually made these changes in her costume.

Upon reaching her own door, she quietly let herself in with her latch-key, and going directly to her chamber, tore off her widow’s weeds, and wig, and threw them hastily upon the bed.  She hurriedly donned another dress, and was about to remove the cleverly simulated signs of age from her face, when she heard the bell ring, and went into the hall to ascertain who had called.  We know the rest, how she recognized the lawyer, and imagined he had come again to annoy her further upon the subject of Mona Forester’s child; how, almost at the same moment, she discovered Mona’s presence in the house, and instantly resolved to lock her up until she could decide what further to do with her.  And thus, laboring under so much excitement, she entirely forgot about the wrinkles and crow’s-feet upon her face, and which so changed its expression.

The moment Mona saw the costume upon the bed everything was made plain to her mind.  Mrs. Bently, of the Chicago and Boston crescent swindle, was no other than Mrs. Montague in a most ingenious disguise.

Glancing about the room for further evidences of the woman’s cunning, she espied a trunk standing open at the foot of the bed, as if some one had been hastily examining the contents and forgotten to shut it afterward.

She approached it, and on top of the tray there lay the very dress of gray ladies’ cloth which she had seen hanging in the closet of a certain room in the Southern Hotel in St. Louis.  Then she knew, beyond a doubt, that Mrs. Montague had also figured as Mrs. Walton, the mother of the miner, in that city.

But who was the miner?

Louis Hamblin, in all probability, although she had not dreamed of such a thing until that moment.

“It is very strange that I should not have recognized Mrs. Montague, in spite of the white hair and the spotted lace vail,” she murmured, thoughtfully.  But after reflecting and recalling the fact that even the woman’s eyebrows had been whitened and the whole expression of the face changed by pencil lines, to simulate wrinkles and furrows, and then covered with a thickly spotted vail, she did not wonder so much.

She was amazed and appalled by these discoveries, and trembling with excitement, she resolved to learn more, if possible.