MUNSEY’S
MAGAZINE
FEBRUARY, 1926
Vol. LXXXVII NUMBER 1
The Thing Beyond Reason
A COMPLETE SHORT NOVEL—THE STORY OF THE STRANGE ADVENTURE THAT LED LEXY MORAN TO A HOUSE OF TRAGEDY AND MYSTERY IN THE SUBURBS OF NEW YORK
By Elisabeth Sanxay Holding
Author of “Angelica,” etc.
THE house was very quiet to-night. There was nothing to disturb Miss Alexandra Moran but the placid ticking of the clock and the faint stir of the curtains at the open window. For that matter, a considerable amount of noise would not have troubled her just then. As she sat at the library table, the light of the shaded lamp shone upon her bright, ruffled head bent over her work in fiercest concentration. She was chewing the end of a badly damaged lead pencil, and she was scowling.
“No!” she said, half aloud. “Won’t do! It can’t be ‘fix’; but, by jiminy, I’ll get it if it takes all night!”
She laid down the pencil and sat back in the chair, with her arms folded. Though her present difficulty concerned nothing more serious than a cross-word puzzle, an observer might have learned a good deal of Miss Moran’s character from her manner of dealing with it. The puzzle itself, with its neat, clear little letters printed in the squares, would have been a revelation that whatever she undertook she did carefully and intelligently—and obstinately.
She was a young little thing, only twenty-three, and quite alone in the world, but not at all dismayed by that. Her father had died some three years ago, and, instead of leaving the snug little fortune she had been taught to expect, he had left nothing at all; so that at twenty she had had her first puzzle to solve—how to keep alive without eating the bread of charity.