Mayor Packard did not come in till daybreak.  He found me waiting for him in the lower hall.

“Well?” he eagerly inquired.

“Mrs. Packard is asleep, I hope.  A shrill laugh, ringing through the house shortly after her return, gave her a nervous shock and she begged that she might be left undisturbed till morning.”

He turned from hanging up his overcoat, and gave me a short stare.

“A laugh!” he repeated.  “Who could have laughed like that?  We are not a very jolly crowd here.”

“I don’t know, sir.  I thought it must have been either Mr. Steele or Nixon, the butler, but each denied it.  There was no one else in this part of the house.”

“Mrs. Packard is very sensitive just now,” he remarked.  Then as he turned away toward the library door:  “I will throw myself on a lounge.  I have but an hour or two before me, as I have my preparations to make for leaving town on the early morning train.  I shall have some final instructions to give you.”

CHAPTER VIII

THE PARAGRAPH

I was up betimes.  Would Mrs. Packard appear at breakfast?  I hardly thought so.  Yet who knows?  Such women have great recuperative powers, and from one so mysteriously affected anything might be expected.  Ready at eight, I hastened down to the second floor to find the lady, concerning whom I had had these doubts, awaiting me on the threshold of her room.  She was carefully dressed and looked pale enough to have been up for hours.  An envelope was in her hand, and the smile which hailed my approach was cold and constrained.

“Good morning,” said she.  “Let us go down.  Let us go down together.  I slept wretchedly and do not feel very strong.  When did Mr. Packard come in?”

“Late.  He went directly to the library.  He said that he had but a short time in which to rest, and would take what sleep he could get on the lounge, when I told him of your very natural nervous attack.”

She sighed—­a sigh which came from no inconsiderable depths—­then with a proud and resolute gesture preceded me down-stairs.

Her husband was already in the breakfast-room.  I could hear his voice as we turned at the foot of the stairs.  Mrs. Packard, hearing it, too, drew herself up still more firmly and was passing bravely forward, when Nixon’s gray head protruded from the doorway and I heard him say: 

“There’s company for breakfast, ma’am.  His Honor could not spare Mr. Steele and asked me to set a place for him.”

I noted a momentary hesitation on Mrs. Packard’s part, then she silently acquiesced and we both passed on.  In another instant we were receiving the greetings and apologies of the gentlemen.  If Mr. Steele had expected that his employer’s wife would offer him her hand, he was disappointed.

“I am happy to welcome one who has proved so useful to my husband,” she remarked with cool though careful courtesy as we all sat down at the table; and, without waiting for an answer, she proceeded to pour the coffee with a proud grace which gave no hint of the extreme feeling by which I had seen her moved the night before.