"An utter mystery."

Turning, I looked at my informant curiously. The inmate of a house
in which a mysterious murder had occurred was rather an interesting
object. But the good-featured and yet totally unimpressive countenance
of the man beside me offered but little basis for even the wildest
imagination to work upon, and, glancing almost immediately away, I
asked:

"Are the ladies very much overcome?"

He took at least a half-dozen steps before replying.

"It would be unnatural if they were not." And whether it was the
expression of his face at the time, or the nature of the reply itself,
I felt that in speaking of these ladies to this uninteresting,
self-possessed secretary of the late Mr. Leavenworth, I was somehow
treading upon dangerous ground. As I had heard they were very
accomplished women, I was not altogether pleased at this discovery. It
was, therefore, with a certain consciousness of relief I saw a Fifth
Avenue stage approach.

"We will defer our conversation," said I. "Here's the stage."

But, once seated within it, we soon discovered that all intercourse
upon such a subject was impossible. Employing the time, therefore, in
running over in my mind what I knew of Mr. Leavenworth, I found that
my knowledge was limited to the bare fact of his being a retired
merchant of great wealth and fine social position who, in default of
possessing children of his own, had taken into his home two nieces, one