exalted natures,--and with that genuine chivalry, which now, alas! is
welnigh as rare as the _aumônière_ of pilgrims, the pastor bravely
cast around the absent woman the broad, soft ermine of his tender
charity.

"Hannah, if your insinuations point to the lady who called here last
night, I can easily explain the suspicious fact of the handkerchief,
which certainly belongs to her; for the room was close, and my
visitor, having raised that window and leaned out for fresh air,
doubtless dropped her handkerchief without observing the loss."

"Do the initials '_O O_' represent her name?" asked Mrs. Lindsay,
whose adroitly propounded interrogatories the previous evening had
elicited no satisfactory information.

"Do not ladies generally stamp their own monograms when marking
articles that compose their wardrobes?" He put the unlucky piece of
cambric in his pocket, and pertinacious Hannah suddenly stooped and
dealt Biörn a blow, which astonished the spectators even more than
the yelping recipient, who dropped something at her feet and crawled
behind his master.

"You horrid, greedy pest! Are you in league with the thieves, that
you must needs try to devour the signs and tell-tales they dropped in
the track of their dirty work? It is only a glove this time, sir, and
it was all crumpled, just so,--where I first saw it, when I ran out
to hunt for footprints. It was hanging on the end of a rose bush,
yonder near the snowball, and you see it was rather too far from the
window here to have fallen down with the handkerchief. Look, Miss
Elise, your hands are small, but this would pinch even your fingers."