"I lived on and on,
As if my heart were kept beneath a glass
And everybody stood, all eyes and ears,
To see and hear it tick,"
E.B. BROWNING.
"Mr. Rutledge, sir!" exclaimed the captain, vehemently, bringing his hand down on the table with a force that made the glasses ring, "it's my opinion that there's a black mystery to be unravelled yet about that murder. It's my opinion that all our ears would tingle if we knew the truth. Certainly, in some inexplicable way, this place is connected with it. The man lurking about the grounds, the footprints across the garden-beds, the cravat found at the old summer-house—all seem to point out this neighborhood as his hiding-place."
"I cannot see that exactly, Captain McGuffy," returned his host. "I acknowledge that there is a mystery, and a dark one, yet to be cleared away from the matter; and that the murderer may have taken a temporary refuge in the woods near the house, is a possible, though not an infallible deduction to be drawn from the circumstances you have mentioned. The fact of garden-beds defaced with footprints on such a night as that of the masquerade, can hardly excite any surprise; and as to the suspicious-looking person lurking about the grounds all day, why, none of the three witnesses who swear to having seen him, can at all describe his appearance or occupation. A drunken loafer from the village sleeping off the effects of a night's carouse in the shelter of our woods, is a much more simple interpretation of it, to my mind."
The captain shook his head. "I cannot agree with you, sir; I cannot think that that cravat, blood-stained and soiled, was left in the summer-house by any village loafer. Village loafers, sir, do not, as a general thing, wear such cravats, nor stain them with anything darker than the drippings of their lager-bier."
"I know you'll all laugh at me,"' said Ellerton Wynkar, "but, absurd as it is, I can't help thinking I've seen that cravat worn by——. Good heavens! what's the matter now! Mrs. Churchill, your niece is going to faint!"
"Oh no!" said Grace, coolly passing me a glass of water. "Only turning white and looking distractingly pretty, then rallying a little, and looking up and saying faintly, 'I'm better, thank you,' and regaining composure gradually and gracefully. That's the programme. We're quite used to it by this time. When I have a fiancé who must go to Europe, I shall be perfected in the art of graceful grief if I attend properly to the example I have now before me."
"There's one art you're not perfected in at all events," said Phil.
"What's that, bonnie Phil; what's that?"
"The art of feeling," said her cousin, shortly.
"Grace is thoughtless," said her mother, and entered into an apology so elaborate, that Phil was really distressed, and felt that he had been most unkind and unjust. He gave his hand to Grace, and said, with an honest smile: