But the widow was mistaken, for Susan had scarcely a thought of her furs, so absorbed was she in throwing what little light she could upon a mystery which was troubling the people and keeping them outside the door, while they talked the matter over. It seemed that the sexton, when, at about ten o’clock on the previous night, he came to see that the fire kindled in the furnace at sunset was safe, had stumbled over a human form lying upon the pile of evergreens gathered for the Christmas decorations, and placed for safe keeping in the cellar of the church. There was a cry between surprise and terror, and a muttered oath, and then the ragged, frightened intruder sprang to his feet, and bounding up the narrow stairway, fled through the open vestry door ere the sexton had time to collect his scattered senses. This was his story, corroborated by Susan Simms, who said that when, at about seven o’clock the previous night, she was passing the church, she saw a dark-looking object, which she at first mistook for a woman, but as she came nearer she saw it was the figure of a man who, at the sound of her steps, dropped behind a pile of rubbish, and thus disappeared from view,—that feeling timid she did not return home that way, but took the more circuitous route past her mother-in-law’s, where she stopped for a moment and repeated the circumstance to the neighbor she found staying there. “Then she didn’t come half a mile out of the way just to tell of her finery,” thought the widow, coming nearer to Susan, and even smoothing the soft fur, which, half an hour before, had so provoked her ire. Various were the surmises as to who the man could be, and why he had entered the lonesome cellar; and the morning services had commenced ere the knot of talkers and listeners at the door disbanded and took their accustomed places in the church. Rose Mather was there as usual, but she knelt in her handsome pew alone, for Will had been gone from her two whole weeks, and Annie was still too much of an invalid to venture out. With others at the door she heard of the intruder, and after asking a few questions she had passed into the aisle, with a certain wise air about her, as if she knew something which she should not tell! As one after another came in, it might have been observed that she turned often and curiously toward the door, glancing occasionally at the spot where Mrs. Baker, now a regular attendant, was in the habit of sitting. She was not there to-day, a fact which no one observed save Rose and the Widow Simms, the latter of whom only noticed it because Annie, she knew, was deeply interested in the repentant woman. “She’s sick, most likely,” the widow thought, while Rose, too, had her own opinion as to what kept Harry’s mother from church that Sunday morning.