I was met at the door by Ellen. She wore a look of dismay which I felt fully accounted for when I looked inside. Disorder reigned from one end of the room to the other, transcending any picture I may have formed in my own mind concerning its probable condition. Mrs. Packard must have forgotten all this disarray, or at least had supposed it to have yielded to the efforts of the maid, when she proposed my awaiting her there. There were bureau-drawers with their contents half on the floor, boxes with their covers off, cupboard-doors ajar and even the closet shelves showing every mark of a frenzied search among them. Her rich gown, soiled to the width of half a foot around the bottom, lay with cut laces and its trimmings in rags under a chair which had been knocked over and left where it fell. Even her jewels had not been put away, but lay scattered on the dresser. Ellen looked ashamed and, when I retired to the one bare place I saw in the bay of the window, muttered as she plunged to lift one of the great boxes:
“It’s as bad as the attic room up-stairs. All the trunks have been emptied on to the floor and one held her best summer dresses. What shall I do? I have a whole morning’s work before me.”
“Let me help you,” I proposed, rising with sudden alacrity. My eyes had just fallen on a small desk at my right, also on the floor beneath and around it. Here, there and everywhere above and below lay scraps of torn-up paper; and on many, if not on all of them, could be seen the broken squares and inverted angles which had marked so curiously the surface of the envelope she had handed to Mr. Steele, and which I had afterward seen her burn.
“A baby can make a deal of mess,” I remarked, hurriedly collecting these scraps and making a motion of throwing them into the waste-paper basket, but hiding them in my blouse instead.
“The baby! Oh, the baby never did that. She’s too young.”
“Oh, I didn’t know. I haven’t seen much of the child though I heard her cry once in the nursery. How old is she?”
“Twenty months and such a darling! You never saw such curls or such eyes. Why, look at this!”
“What?” I demanded, hurrying to the closet, where Ellen stood bending over something invisible to me. “Oh, nothing,” she answered, coming quickly out. But in another moment, her tongue getting the better of her discretion, she blurted out: “Do you suppose Mrs. Packard had any idea of going with the mayor? Her bag is in there almost packed. I was wondering where all her toilet articles were. That accounts—” Stopping, she cast a glance around the room, ending with a shake of the head and a shrug. “She needn’t have pulled out all her things,” she sharply complained. “Certain, she is a mysterious lady;—as queer as she is kind.”