writer as soon as the writer was well enough to appreciate what was being done. Last, but not least, Plume had picked up near the door in Blakely's room the circular, nearly flat, leather-covered case which had dropped, apparently, from Natzie's gown, and, as it had neither lock nor latch, Plume had opened it to examine its contents. To his surprise it contained a beautifully executed miniature, a likeness of a fair young girl, with soft blue eyes and heavy, arching brows, a delicately molded face and mouth and chin, all framed in a tumbling mass of tawny hair. It was the face of a child of twelve or thirteen, one that he had never seen and of whom he knew nothing. Neither cover, backing, nor case of the miniature gave the faintest clew as to its original or as to its ownership. What was Natzie doing with this?--and to whom did it belong? A little study satisfied him there was something familiar in the face, yet he could not place it. The very night of her coming, therefore, he told his wife the story and handed her the portrait. One glance was enough. "I know it, yes," said Mrs. Plume, "though I, too, have never seen her. She died the winter after it was taken. It is Mr. Blakely's sister, Ethel," and Mrs. Plume sat gazing at the sweet girl features, with strange emotion in her aging face. There was something--some story--behind all this that Plume could not fathom, and it nettled him. Perhaps he, too, was yielding to a fit of nerves. Elise, the maid, had been remanded to her room, and could be heard moving about with heavy, yet uncertain tread. "She is right over Blakely," quoth the major impatiently. "Why can't the girl be quiet?" "Why did you bring him _here_, then?" was the weary answer. "I cannot control Elise. They have treated her most cruelly." "There are things you cannot explain and that she must," said he, and then, to change the subject, stretched forth his hand to take again the picture. She drew it back one moment, then, remembering, surrendered it. "You saw this in--St. Louis, I suppose," said he awkwardly. He never could bear to refer to those days--the days before he had come into her life. "Not that perhaps, but the photograph from which it was probably painted. She was his only sister. He was educating her in the East." And again her thoughts were drifting back to those St. Louis days, when, but for the girl sister he so loved, she and Neil Blakely had been well-nigh inseparable. Someone had said then, she remembered, that she was jealous even of that love.