We were both silent for a few minutes.

—­Did you ever see the young girl’s drawing-books,—­I said, presently.

All but one,—­he answered;—­she keeps a lock on that, and won’t show it.  Ma’am Allen, (the young rogue sticks to that name, in speaking of the gentleman with the diamond,) Ma’am Allen tried to peek into it one day when she left it on the sideboard.  “If you please,” says she,—­’n’ took it from him, ‘n’ gave him a look that made him curl up like a caterpillar on a hot shovel.  I only wished he had n’t, and had jest given her a little sass, for I’ve been takin’ boxin’-lessons, ‘n’ I ’ve got a new way of counterin’ I want to try on to somebody.

—­The end of all this was, that I came away from the young fellow’s room, feeling that there were two principal things that I had to live for, for the next six weeks or six months, if it should take so long.  These were, to get a sight of the young girl’s drawing-book, which I suspected had her heart shut up in it, and to get a look into the Little Gentleman’s room.

I don’t doubt you think it rather absurd that I should trouble myself about these matters.  You tell me, with some show of reason, that all I shall find in the young girl’s—­book will be some outlines of angels with immense eyes, traceries of flowers, rural sketches, and caricatures, among which I shall probably have the pleasure of seeing my own features figuring.  Very likely.  But I’ll tell you what I think I shall find.  If this child has idealized the strange little bit of humanity over which she seems to have spread her wings like a brooding dove,—­if, in one of those wild vagaries that passionate natures are so liable to, she has fairly sprung upon him with her clasping nature, as the sea-flowers fold about the first stray shell-fish that brushes their outspread tentacles, depend upon it, I shall find the marks of it in this drawing-book of hers,—­if I can ever get a look at it,—­fairly, of course, for I would not play tricks to satisfy my curiosity.

Then, if I can get into this Little Gentleman’s room under any fair pretext, I shall, no doubt, satisfy myself in five minutes that he is just like other people, and that there is no particular mystery about him.

The night after my visit to the young man John, I made all these and many more reflections.  It was about two o’clock in the morning,—­bright starlight,—­so light that I could make out the time on my alarm-clock,—­when I woke up trembling and very moist.  It was the heavy dragging sound, as I had often heard it before that waked me.  Presently a window was softly closed.  I had just begun to get over the agitation with which we always awake from nightmare dreams, when I heard the sound which seemed to me as of a woman’s voice,—­the clearest, purest soprano which one could well conceive of.  It was not loud, and I could not distinguish a word, if it was a woman’s voice; but there were recurring phrases of sound and snatches of rhythm that reached me, which suggested the idea of complaint, and sometimes, I thought, of passionate grief and despair.  It died away at last,—­and then I heard the opening of a door, followed by a low, monotonous sound, as of one talking,—­and then the closing of a door,—­and presently the light on the opposite wall disappeared and all was still for the night.