The question may have been asked, before this point in narration, by some of those who have been induced to follow the progress of this story--What has become of some of the prominent characters first introduced, Dexter Ralston, the stalwart Virginian, and the girl Kate, who seemed at that time to be so closely identified with the movements of the "red woman." The curiosity is a natural one, whether there really was such a secret of disloyalty, hidden away either in the house on Prince Street or that on East 5--, as justified Tom Leslie and Walter Harding in their long ride at midnight and their subsequent interview with Police-Superintendent Kennedy. To some extent this question can be answered, at this point; but there will still remain some mysteries unexplainable until the end of this narration, and even some impossible to elucidate until the close of the war and the re-union of Northern and Southern society on the old basis, makes it possible to reveal all that may have occurred during the conflict. There are two modes in which romances can be written. The first, and perhaps the more popular, is that in which no bound whatever is set by either probability or conscience--in which the narrator assumes to know what never could be known except to an omniscient being, and to describe such circumstances as never could have occurred in any world under the same general regulations as our own. To this writer, no doors are barred, and from him the secret of no heart can be hidden. He has no difficulty whatever in retracing the path of history, back to the days of Michael Paleologus or Timour the Tartar, and describing the viands set upon their tables and the thoughts that may have entered their brains; while in events of the present day he finds no more trouble in describing circumstantially the last moments of a traveller dying alone at the North Pole or in the midst of the most trackless waste of Sahara. The manner in which he became possessed of the facts narrated, is held to be a matter of very little consequence; and if he lacks the opportunity of calling other witnesses or surrounding circumstances to corroborate him, he at least is removed from the fear of any authoritative contradiction. The reader, of course, would sometimes be grateful for a little insight into what is so impenetrably hidden; and if the links binding the narrator to his subject were made a little plainer to the naked eye, perhaps more general satisfaction might be given. When, for instance, in the "Legend of the Terrible Tower," Sir Bronzeface the Implacable is shown as threatening the Lady Charmengarde with the most cruel tortures his slighted love and growing hate can devise--when the very words of that atrocious monster are set down as carefully as if they had been taken from his lips by the rapid pencil of the stenographer--and when in the context we learn that in the midst of his threatenings, the thousand barrels of gunpowder secretly stored in