"Ugh!" said Harding, drawing an evident sigh of relief at the conclusion of so long a story, which had yet been so absorbingly interesting to him, under the circumstances, that he could not go to sleep in the midst of it--"Ugh! your idea--I beg your pardon!--your _relation_ of the great yellow worms and their affinity to shoulder-straps, is almost enough to make a man, however patriotic, shudder at the thought of assuming such a decoration." "I believe you, my boy!" said Leslie, quoting an expressive vulgarism which Orpheus C. Kerr had just been making so extensively popular. "And that female combination of ghastly red and magical knowledge--" "That remarkable combination," said Leslie, anticipating and interrupting the half-sneer that was coming--"is the red woman whom I saw to-night in the house on Prince Street, just before I fell out of the tree; and it was her voice that I heard on the piazza yonder just before the door opened. What do you think of it?" "Think?" said Harding, earnestly this time. "I am altogether too much wrapped in that remarkable white mist that you have been shaking round me, to _think_! Then the events of to-night--so much crowded in a little space, and that woman coming into the midst of it all! My life has been a rather plain one, so far, and I have had to do with very few mysteries; but here I am tumbling into the midst of one thicker than the fog on the East River in a February thaw!" "And yet the mystery of the two houses, and of the red woman so far as possible, I am going to go through like the proverbial streak of lightning through a gooseberry-bush, before I have done with it!" said Leslie, his habitual good opinion of his own powers coming once more into play. "You are ready to go with me?" "All the way!" said Harding, graphically; and it was then that after a few words of arrangement the two friends parted, to catch what might still remain of uneasy morning slumber, in which red women, flying carriage-lamps and respectable young men skulking in doorways and areas, were very likely to be prominent. CHAPTER VI. COLONEL EGBERT CRAWFORD AND BELL CRAWFORD--SOME SPECULATIONS ON THE SPY SYSTEM--JOSEPHINE HARRIS ON A RECONNOISSANCE, AND WHAT SHE SAW AND HEARD.