"Never been seen? But who is the housekeeper, then?"
"Oh, they've got another. Never'll be Mrs. Leeth's equal, though. She left on the first of the month."
"But when she was paid off, didn't anybody inquire?"
"She never was paid off," he said quietly. "She never came for her money."
THE UNBURIED
The talk shifted at length—as it inevitably must—to women, and the unalterable and uncharted mystery of their mental currents: the jagged and cruelly unsuspected reefs that rear suddenly under rippling shoal-water, the maelstrom that boils just beyond the soft curve of the fairest cape.
"There's no good asking 'why,'" said the great doctor slowly, "you might as well ask, 'why not.' They're incomprehensible. For thirty years I've studied them. Thirty years...."
He leaned forward over the table weightily. The others unconsciously bent toward him.
"Once I thought it was spasmodic—unrelated," he went on thoughtfully, counting his words, it seemed, "but not now. No. I believe there is a law—a big law—they follow, an orbit so extended that any examples one may collect count for too little to help. They seem to vary..." he stared at the siphons and rings of wet on the table.