“Go away, Loretta; I am ill; have been ill for two days. I don’t like people to look at me like that!” Then, as the girl shrank back, added in a breaking voice: “When Mr. Jeffrey comes home—” and said no more for several minutes, during which she clutched her throat with both hands and struggled with herself till she got her voice back and found herself able to repeat: “When Mr. Jeffrey comes,—if he does come,—tell him that I was right about the way that novel ended. Remember that you are to say to him the moment you see him that I was right about the novel, and that he is to look and see if it did not end as I said it would. And Loretta—” here she rose and approached the speaker with a sweet, appealing look which brought tears to the impressionable girl’s eyes, “don’t go gossiping about me downstairs. I sha’n’t be sick long. I am going to be better soon, very soon. By the time you see me here again I shall be quite like my old self. Forget how—how”—and Loretta said she seemed to have difficulty in finding the right word here—“how childish I have been.” Of course Loretta promised, but she is not sure that she would have had the courage to keep all this to herself if she had not heard Mrs. Jeffrey stop in Miss Tuttle’s room on her way out. That relieved her, and enabled her to go downstairs to her own supper with more appetite than she had thought ever to have again. Alas! it was the last good meal she was able to eat for days. In three hours afterward a man came from the station house with the news of Mrs. Jeffrey’s suicide in the horrible old house in which she had been married only two weeks before. As this had been a continuous narrative and concisely told, the coroner had not interrupted her. When at this point a little gasp escaped Miss Tuttle and a groan broke from Francis Jeffrey’s hitherto sealed lips, the feelings of the whole assemblage seemed to find utterance. A young wife’s misery culminating in death on the very spot where she had been so lately married! What could be more thrilling, or appeal more closely to the general heart of humanity? But the cause of that misery! This was what every one present was eager to have explained. This is what we now expected the coroner to bring out. But instead of continuing on the line he had opened up, he proceeded to ask: “Where were you when this officer brought the news you mention?” “In the hall, sir. I opened the door for him.” “And to whom did he first mention his errand?” “To Miss Tuttle. She had come in just before him and was standing at the foot of the stairs.” “What! Was Miss Tuttle out that evening?” “Yes; she went out very soon after Mrs. Jeffrey left. When she came in she said that she had been around the block, but she must have gone around it more than once, for she was absent two hours.” “Did you let her in?” “Yes, sir.” “And she said she had been around the block?” “Yes, sir” “Did she say anything else?” “She asked if Mr. Jeffrey had come in” “Anything else?”