She asked no more questions and, for the next few hours, she did try to think of Seymour Covell. But after the stretcher, with its white and still occupant, had been brought carefully downstairs, after it had been just as carefully placed aboard the wagon which was to carry it to the railway station, after the commotion attending upon the departure was over and she was left alone--then her thoughts returned to the forbidden subject and remained there. Foster Townsend had been absent-minded and distrait ever since his return from his call at the Griffin studio the previous afternoon. It was obvious that he did not care to talk of his interview with Bob. And to-day, when she again questioned him, he had been just as non-committal. That there was something mysterious about this accident to Seymour Covell she had been almost sure from the beginning. Bob’s behavior that fateful night was strange. He, too, had avoided her questions; had run away from them. She had guessed and surmised and dreaded--and now, this very forenoon, when she stopped in at the millinery shop to chat with her Aunt Reliance, whom she had not seen for a week, this new and frightening rumor had been whispered in her ear. It was Abbie Makepeace who had whispered it. Reliance Clark was out, delivering a hat at the home of a customer. Millard was not in evidence. Abbie had a clear ten minutes; she knew it, and she could say a great deal in that time. Whatever fabric of fact there might have been in the strange story was well covered with fictional embroidery when it reached Miss Makepeace, and she handed it on without the loss of a thread. “So there ’tis,” she said, in conclusion. “For the land sakes don’t say _I_ said there was any truth in it. Who the person was that saw ’em there--if anybody did see ’em--I’m sure I don’t know and neither does anybody except that one--if there was such a one, as I said before. And just as likely there wasn’t. It’s all over town anyhow. Your Aunt Reliance heard it, of course, and she declares up and down she doesn’t believe a word of it. She gets real mad if I so much as mention it in this shop. Thought she’d take my head off this very mornin’, I did. ‘Well,’ says I, ‘you needn’t lay me out. I wasn’t on the lower road at two o’clock in the mornin’. I was in my bed and asleep, where I belonged. And, even if it is all a lie, I don’t see why you need fly up in the air so. I declare, I--’” And so on. The mill was still going when Esther hurried from the shop. She went home, thinking of what she had just heard. She was thinking of it now, as she sat there in the library. And the longer she thought the more certain she became that she must know the truth. She must.