confounded peppermint, and Miss Hart seems rather misty about it, and
if the girl knows she won't tell; but I suspect I may be the last
person who saw that poor woman alive. I found a note waiting for me
from her when I arrived yesterday, and--well, she wanted to see me
alone about something very particular, and she--" Horace paused and
reddened. "Well, you know what women are, and of course there was
really no place at the hotel where I could have been sure of a
private interview with her. I couldn't go to her room, and one might
as well talk in a trolley-car as that hotel parlor; and she didn't
want to come here to the house and be closeted with me, and she
didn't want to linger after school, for those school-girls are the
very devil when it comes to seeing anything; and though I will admit
it does sound ridiculous and romantic, I don't see myself what else
she could have done. She asked me in her note to step out in the
grove about ten o'clock, when the house was quiet. She wrote she had
something very important to say to me. So I felt like a fool, but I
didn't go to bed, and I stole down the front stairs, and she was out
there in the grove waiting for me, and we sat down on the bench there
and she told me some things."

Henry nodded gravely. He now looked at Horace, and there was relief
in his frowning face.

"I can tell you some of the things that she said to me," continued
Horace, "and I am going to. You are connected with it--that is, you
are through your wife. Miss Farrel wasn't Miss at all. She was a
married woman." Henry nodded again. "She had not lived with her
husband long, however, and she had been married some twenty years
ago. She was older than she looked. For some reason she did not get
on with him, and he left her. I don't myself feel that I know what