"But how could the burglars have overlooked the money and jewellery?"
Again the minister sighed heavily, and, closing the drawer, said:
"Perhaps we may discover some trace in the garden."
"Aye, sir,—I searched before I raised an uproar, and here is a handkerchief that I found under that window, on the violet bed. It was frozen fast to the leaves."
Hannah held it up between the tips of her fingers, as if fearful of contamination, and eyed it with an expression of loathing. Mr. Hargrove took it to the light and examined it, while an unwonted frown wrinkled his usually placid brow. It was a dainty square of finest cambric, bordered with a wreath of embroidered lilies, and in one corner exceedingly embellished "O O" stared like wide wondering eyes, at the strange hands that profaned it.
"Do you notice what a curious, outlandish smell it has? It struck my nostrils sharper than hartshorn when I picked it up. No rum-drinking, tobacco-smoking burglar in breeches dropped that lace rag."
Hannah set her stout arms akimbo, and looked "unutterable things" at the delicate fabric, that as if to deprecate its captors was all the while breathing out deliciously sweet but vague hints,—now of eglantine, and now of that subtle spiciness that dwells in daphnes, and anon plays hide-and-seek in nutmeg geranium blooms.
Reluctance to admission of the suspicion of unworthiness in others is the invariable concomitant of true nobility of soul in all pure and exalted natures,—and with that genuine chivalry, which now, alas! is welnigh as rare as the aumônière of pilgrims, the pastor bravely cast around the absent woman the broad, soft ermine of his tender charity.
"Hannah, if your insinuations point to the lady who called here last night, I can easily explain the suspicious fact of the handkerchief, which certainly belongs to her; for the room was close, and my visitor, having raised that window and leaned out for fresh air, doubtless dropped her handkerchief without observing the loss."
"Do the initials 'O O' represent her name?" asked Mrs. Lindsay, whose adroitly propounded interrogatories the previous evening had elicited no satisfactory information.