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Page 6
I immediately sat down before the type-writer. I was in
something of a maze, but felt that I must follow his lead. As I
proceeded to insert the paper and lay out the copy to hand, he
crossed over to the young man at the other end of the room and
began a short conversation which ended in some trivial demand
that sent the young man from the room. As the door closed behind
him Mayor Packard returned to my side.
"Keep on with your work and never mind mistakes," said he. "What
I want is to hear the questions you told me to expect from you if
you stayed."
Seemingly Mayor Packard did not wish this young man to know my
position in the house. Was it possible he did not wholly trust
him? My hands trembled from the machine and I was about to turn
and give my full thought to what I had to say. But pride checked
the impulse. "No," I muttered in quick dissuasion, to myself.
"He must see that I can do two things at once and do both well."
And so I went on with the letter.
"When," I asked, "did you first see the change in Mrs. Packard?"
"On Tuesday afternoon at about this time."
"What had happened on that day? Had she been out?"
"Yes, I think she told me later that she had been out."
"Do you know where?"
"To some concert, I believe. I did not press her with questions,
Miss Saunders; I am a poor inquisitor."
Click, click; the machine was working admirably.
"Have you reason to think," I now demanded, "that she brought her
unhappiness in with her, when she returned from that concert?"
"No; for when I returned home myself, as I did earlier than
usual that night, I heard her laughing with the child in the
nursery. It was afterward, some few minutes afterward, that I
came upon her sitting in such a daze of misery, that she did not
recognize me when I spoke to her. I thought it was a passing
mood at the time; she is a sensitive woman and she had been
reading--I saw the book lying on the floor at her side; but when,
having recovered from her dejection--a dejection, mind you, which
she would neither acknowledge nor explain--she accompanied me
out to dinner, she showed even more feeling on our return,
shrinking unaccountably from leaving the carriage and showing,
not only in this way but in others, a very evident distaste to
reenter her own house. Now, whatever hold I still retain upon
her is of so slight a nature that I am afraid every day she will
leave me."
"Leave you!"
My fingers paused; my astonishment had got the better of me.
"Yes; it is as bad as that. I don't know what day you will send
me a telegram of three words, 'She has gone.' Yet she loves me,
really and truly loves me. That is the mystery of it. More than
this, her very heart-strings are knit up with those of our
child."
"Mayor Packard,"--I had resumed work,--"was any letter delivered
to her that day?"
"That I can not say."
Fact one for me to establish.
"The wives of men like you--men much before the world, men in the
thick of strife, social and political--often receive letters of a
very threatening character."
"She would have shown me any such, if only to put me on my guard.
She is physically a very brave woman and not at all nervous."
"Those letters sometimes assume the shape of calumny. Your
character may have been attacked."
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