the blue mountains beyond.  Wilford was with her; he had come out to spend the night, returning to the city in the morning.  Now that he had accomplished his purpose he was in the best of spirits, treating Katy with unwonted kindness and wondering why he hated so to leave her, while she, too, clung to him, wishing he could stay.  Their parting was only for two days, for this was Thursday, and he was to return on Saturday, but in the hearts of both there was that dark foreboding which is so often a sure precursor of evil.  Twice Wilford turned back to kiss his wife, feeling tempted once to tell her he was sorry for his jealousy and distrust, but such confession was hard for him and so he left it unsaid, looking back to the window against which Katy’s face was pressed as she watched him going from her, but little guessing what would be ere she looked on him again.

* * * * *

Tom Tubbs sat reading Chitty as usual when Mr. Cameron came in from his trip up the river.  Since Katy’s last call at the office Tom had been haunted with her face as it looked when Wilford’s cold greeting fell on her ear, and after a private conference with Mattie, who listened eagerly to every item of information with regard to Katy, he had come to the conclusion that his employer was a brute, and that his wife was not as happy as it was his duty to make her.

“It’s mean in him to speak so hateful to her,” he was thinking just as Wilford came in, appearing so very amiable and good-humored that the boy ventured to inquire for Mrs. Cameron.  “She looked so pale and sick, the other day,” he said, “almost as bad in fact as she did that night in the cars with Dr. Grant, just before she was so dangerously ill.”

“What’s that?  What did you say?” Wilford asked quickly, and Tom, thinking he had not been understood, repeated his words, while in a voice which Tom scarcely knew, it was so low and husky, Wilford asked:  “What night was Mrs. Cameron in the cars with Dr. Grant?  When was it, and where?”

As suspicion is an intense magnifier, so the absence of it will blind one completely, and Tom was thus blindfolded as he stated in detail how two months or more ago, while Mr. Cameron was absent, he had been sent by Mr. Ray to Hartford, returning in the early train, that just before him, in the car, a gentleman sat with a lady who seemed to be sick, at all events her head lay on his shoulder and he occasionally bent over her to see if she wanted anything.

“I did not mind much about them,” Tom said, “till it got to broad daylight, when I saw the man was Dr. Grant, and when we reached New York the lady threw back her veil and I saw it was Mrs. Cameron.”

“Are you sure?” and Wilford grasped Tom’s arm with an energy which made the boy wince, while there came over him a suspicion that he had talked too much.

But it could not now be helped, and to Wilford’s question he answered: