among them.  Her rich gown, soiled to the width of half a foot around the bottom, lay with cut laces and its trimmings in rags under a chair which had been knocked over and left where it fell.  Even her jewels had not been put away, but lay scattered on the dresser.  Ellen looked ashamed and, when I retired to the one bare place I saw in the bay of the window, muttered as she plunged to lift one of the great boxes: 

“It’s as bad as the attic room up-stairs.  All the trunks have been emptied on to the floor and one held her best summer dresses.  What shall I do?  I have a whole morning’s work before me.”

“Let me help you,” I proposed, rising with sudden alacrity.  My eyes had just fallen on a small desk at my right, also on the floor beneath and around it.  Here, there and everywhere above and below lay scraps of torn-up paper; and on many, if not on all of them, could be seen the broken squares and inverted angles which had marked so curiously the surface of the envelope she had handed to Mr. Steele, and which I had afterward seen her burn.

“A baby can make a deal of mess,” I remarked, hurriedly collecting these scraps and making a motion of throwing them into the waste-paper basket, but hiding them in my blouse instead.

“The baby!  Oh, the baby never did that.  She’s too young.”

“Oh, I didn’t know.  I haven’t seen much of the child though I heard her cry once in the nursery.  How old is she?”

“Twenty months and such a darling!  You never saw such curls or such eyes.  Why, look at this!”

“What?” I demanded, hurrying to the closet, where Ellen stood bending over something invisible to me.  “Oh, nothing,” she answered, coming quickly out.  But in another moment, her tongue getting the better of her discretion, she blurted out:  “Do you suppose Mrs. Packard had any idea of going with the mayor?  Her bag is in there almost packed.  I was wondering where all her toilet articles were.  That accounts—­” Stopping, she cast a glance around the room, ending with a shake of the head and a shrug.  “She needn’t have pulled out all her things,” she sharply complained.  “Certain, she is a mysterious lady;—­as queer as she is kind.”

CHAPTER X

A GLIMMER OF THE TRUTH

This was a sentiment I could thoroughly indorse.  Mrs. Packard was certainly an enigma to me.  Leaving Ellen to finish her work, I went upstairs to my own room, and, taking out the scraps of paper I had so carefully collected, spread them out before me on the lid of the desk.

They were absolutely unintelligible to me—­marks and nothing more.  Useless to waste time over such unmeaning scrawls when I had other and more tangible subjects to consider.  But I should not destroy them.  There might come a time when I should be glad to give them the attention which my present excitement forbade.  Putting them back in my desk, I settled myself into a serious contemplation of the one fact which seemed to give a partial if not wholly satisfactory explanation of Mrs. Packard’s peculiar conduct during the last two weeks—­her belief that she had been visited by a specter of an unholy, threatening aspect.