Thus, she corresponded with a friend of her mother’s in India.  She talked at times as if it were her ideal home, and showed many tastes which might well be vestiges of early Oriental impressions.  She made herself a rude hammock,—­such as are often used in hot climates,—­and swung it between two elms.  Here she would lie in the hot summer days, and fan herself with the sandal-wood fan her friend in India had sent her,—­the perfume of which, the women said, seemed to throw her into day-dreams, which were almost like trances.

These circumstances gave a general direction to his ideas, which were presently fixed more exactly by two circumstances which he learned for himself and kept to himself; for he had no idea of making a hue and cry, and yet he did not mean that Myrtle Hazard should get away if he could help it.

The first fact was this.  He found among the copies of the city newspaper they took at The Poplars a recent number from which a square had been cut out.  He procured another copy of this paper of the same date, and found that the piece cut out was an advertisement to the effect that the A 1 Ship Swordfish, Captain Hawkins, was to sail from Boston for Calcutta, on the 20th of June.

The second fact was the following.  On the window-sill of her little hanging chamber, which the women allowed him to inspect, he found some threads of long, black, glossy hair caught by a splinter in the wood.  They were Myrtle’s of course.  A simpleton might have constructed a tragedy out of this trivial circumstance,—­how she had cast herself from the window into the waters beneath it,—­how she had been thrust out after a struggle, of which this shred from her tresses was the dreadful witness,—­and so on.  Murray Bradshaw did not stop to guess and wonder.  He said nothing about it, but wound the shining threads on his finger, and, as soon as he got home, examined them with a magnifier.  They had been cut off smoothly, as with a pair of scissors.  This was part of a mass of hair, then, which had been shorn and thrown from the window.  Nobody would do that but she herself.  What would she do it for?  To disguise her sex, of course.  The other inferences were plain enough.

The wily young man put all these facts and hints together, and concluded that he would let the rustics drag the ponds and the river, and scour the woods and swamps, while he himself went to the seaport town from which she would without doubt sail if she had formed the project he thought on the whole most probable.

Thus it was that we found him hurrying to the nearest station to catch the train to Boston, while they were all looking for traces of the missing girl nearer home.  In the cars he made the most suggestive inquiries he could frame, to stir up the gentlemanly conductor’s memory.  Had any young fellow been on the train within a day or two, who had attracted his notice?  Smooth, handsome face, black eyes, short black hair, new clothes, not fitting very well,