“Pardon me,” she exclaimed; and, meeting his amused gaze with one equally expressive, she carelessly added: “I certainly brought a letter down with me.”
Bowing pleasantly, but with that indefinable air of respect which bespeaks the stranger, he waited while she hastened back to the tray and drew from under it a second paper.
“Pardon my carelessness,” she said. “I must have caught up a scrawl of the baby’s in taking this from my desk.”
She brought forward a letter and ended the whole remarkable episode by handing it now to her husband, who, with an apologetic glance at the other, put it in his pocket.
I say remarkable; for in the folded slip which had passed back and forth between her and the secretary, I saw, or thought I saw, a likeness to the paper she had brought the night before out of the attic.
If Mayor Packard saw anything unusual in his wife’s action he made no mention of it when I went into his study at nine o’clock. And it was so much of an enigma to me that I was not ready to venture a question regarding it.
Her increased spirits and more natural conduct were the theme of the few sentences he addressed me, and while he urged precaution and a continued watch upon his wife, he expressed the fondest hope that he should find her fully restored on his return at the end of two weeks.
I encouraged his hopes, and possibly shared them; but I changed my mind, as he probably did his, when a few minutes later we met her in the hall hurrying toward us with a newspaper in her hand and a ghastly look on her face. “See! see! what they have dared to print!” she cried, with a look, full of anguish, into his bewildered face.
He took the sheet, read, and flushed, then suddenly grew white. “Outrageous!” he exclaimed. Then tenderly, “My poor darling! that they should dare to drag your name into this abominable campaign!”
“And for no reason,” she faltered; “there is nothing wrong with me. You believe that; you are sure of that,” she cried. I saw the article later. It ran something like this: