Esther busied herself looking after a dozen little domestic arrangements, to which no one else seemed capable of attendance, and Mellicent laid her head on her mother's lap, and never ceased crying, except for one brief interval, when she darted upstairs to peep inside the old oak chest, prompted thereto by a sudden reminiscence of the bride of the "Mistletoe Bough." There was no Peggy inside the chest, however; only a few blankets, and a very strong smell of camphor; so Mellicent crept back to her footstool, and cried with redoubled energy. In the kitchen the fat old cook sat with a hand planted on either knee, and thrilled the other servants with an account of how "a cousin of me own brother-in-law, him that married our Annie, had a child as went a-missing, as fine a girl as you could wish to see from June to January. Beautiful kerly 'air, for all the world like Miss Mellicent's, and such nice ways with her! Everybody loved that child, gentle and simple. `Beller,' 'er name was, after her mother. She went out unbeknownst, just as it might be Miss Peggy, and they searched and better searched,"--cook's hands waved up and down, and the heads of the listeners wagged in sympathy--"and never a trace could they find. 'Er father--he's a stone-mason by trade, and getting good money--he knocked off work, and his friends they knocked off too, and they searched the country far and wide. Day and night I tell you they searched, a week on end, and poor Isabeller nearly off her head with grief. I've heard my sister say as she never tasted bite nor sup the whole time, and was wasted to a shadow. Eh, poor soul, it's hard to rare up a child, and have it go out smiling and bonnie, and never see nothink of it again but its bones--for she had fallen into a lime pit, had Beller, and it was nothing but her skeleton as they brought 'ome. There was building going on around there, and she was playing near the pit--childlike--just as it might be Miss Peggy..." Soon and on. The horrors accumulated with every moment. The housemaid had heard tell of a beautiful little girl, the heiress to a big estate, who had been carried off by strolling gipsies, and never been seen again by her sorrowing relatives; while the waitress hinted darkly that the time might come when it would be a comfort to know force had been employed, for sharper than a serpent's tooth was an ungrateful child, and she always _had_ said that there was something uncanny about that little Miss Saville!