The girl was seized with as great wonder as he himself had been, and there was even a greater cause for astonishment on her part, insomuch as, according to her declaration, she had cleaned out and dusted the parlour within half an hour of going forth, and these articles were certainly not in the room then. As for the outer door, she had left it fastened in the usual way, and the windows were carefully drawn down before her departure. Where _could_ they have come from, she questioned both her master and herself, with an equal chance of a satisfactory answer from either. Then she would not have been a woman if she could have resisted the claims of superstition in a case so inexplicable, so extraordinary, so unparalleled even in winter fireside stories. And so she looked at her master, and he looked at her, in blank wonder, without either of them having the power of venturing even a surmise as to how or by what earthly or unearthly means those ominous things, so terrible in the associations by which they were linked to their owners, came to be where they were. After some longer time uselessly occupied, Patrick Halliday bethought himself of going to Writers’ Court, so taking up the silver-buckled shoe, and putting it into his large coat pocket, he proceeded to Mrs Blair’s. He found her in that state of reconciled despondency to which she had been reduced for more than two months; but the moment she saw Patrick Halliday enter, she sprang up as if she had been quickened by the impulse of a new-born hope rising amidst the clouds of a long-settled despair. The movement was soon stayed when her keenness scanned the face of the man; but a new feeling took possession of her when she saw him draw out of his pocket the silver-buckled shoe with which she had been as familiar as with her own. “Where, in the Lord’s name!--” she cried, without being able to say more, while she seized spasmodically the strange object, still covered as it was with the mould, and with the silver obscured by the passage of time. And, gazing at it, she heard Halliday’s account of how he came to be in possession of it, along with the slipper. “Have you the neighbour in the house?” he inquired. “No, no,” said she; “but I am certain that that is one of the shoes Archibald had on the day he disappeared. Oh, sir, I can scarcely look at these initials; and there is such a death-like odour about it that it sickens me.” “It is the same with the slipper,” said he. “It would seem that both of them had been taken off the feet of corpses.” “Strange mystery altogether,” added she, with a deep sigh. “Oh, I could have wished I had not seen these--it only serves to renew my care, without satisfying my natural desire to know the fate of one I loved so dearly.” “It is so with me as well, madam,” rejoined Mr Patrick; “but the finding of this shoe and slipper may satisfy us of the connexion between your husband and my wife.”