"'You do not know where she is?' I repeated. 'How could you be so self-possessed through all these hours and all this maddened searching if you did not know she was safe?'
"'I did know she was safe. She swore to me before she set foot on your doorstep that she could so hide herself in these walls that no one could ever find her till she chose to reveal herself; and I believed her, and felt secure.'
"I did not know what to say.
"'But she is a stranger,' I murmured. 'What does she know about my house?'
"'She is a stranger to you,' he retorted, 'but she may not be a stranger to the house. How long have you lived here?'
"I could not say long. It was at the most but a year; so I merely shook my head, but I felt strangely nonplussed.
"This feeling, however, soon gave way to one much more serious as the moments fled by and presently the hours, and she did not come. We tried to curb our impatience, tried to believe that her delay was only owing to extra caution; but as morning waxed to noon, alarm took the place of satisfaction in our breasts, and we began to search the house ourselves, calling her name up and down the halls and through the empty rooms, till it seemed as if the very walls must open and reveal us the being so frantically desired.
"'She is not in the house,' I now asserted to the almost frenzied bridegroom. 'Our lies have come back upon our heads, and it is in the river we must look for her.'
"But he would not agree with me in this, and repeated again and again: 'She said she would hide here. She would not deceive me, nor would she have sought death alone. Leave me to look for her another hour. I must, I can, I will find her yet!'
"But he never did. After that last fond look with which she turned down that very hall you see before you, we saw her no more; and if my house owns no ghost and never echoes to the sound of a banshee's warning, it is not because it does not own a mystery which is certainly thrilling enough to give us either."