CHAPTER V. THE STOLEN KEY. I was too young to reason in those days. Had I not been, had I been able to say to myself that no act requiring such continued precaution could take place in the heart of a great city without ultimate, if not instant, detection, instinct would still have assured me that what I read was true, however improbable or unheard of it might seem. That the recognition of this fact imposed upon me two almost irreconcilable duties I was slower to perceive. But soon, too soon, it became apparent even to my girlish mind, that, as the wife of the man who had committed this great and inconceivable wrong, I was bound, not only to make an immediate attempt to release the women he so outrageously held imprisoned in their own house, but to so release them that he should escape the opprobrium of his own act. That I might have time to think, and that I might be saved, if but for one day, contact with one it was almost my duty to hate, I came back to him with the plea that I might spend the day with the Vandykes instead of accompanying him down town as usual. I think he was glad of the freedom my absence offered him, for he gave me the permission I asked, and in ten minutes I was in my old home. Mrs. Vandyke received me with effusion. It was not the first time she had seen me since my marriage, but it was the first time she had seen me alone. “My dear!” she exclaimed, turning me about till my unwilling face met the light, “is this the wild-wood lassie I gave into Mr. Allison’s keeping a week ago!” “It is the house!” I excitedly gasped, “the empty, lonely, echoing house! I am afraid in it, even with my husband. It gives me creepy feelings, _as if a murder had been committed in it_.” She broke into a laugh; I hear the sound now, an honest, amused and entirely reassuring laugh, that relieved me in one way and depressed me in another. “The idea! _that_ house!” she cried. “I never thought you a girl to have nervous fancies. Why, it is the most matter-of-fact old mansion in the city. All its traditions are of the most respectable kind; no skeleton in those closets! By the way, my dear, has Mr. Allison shown you any of the curious old things those rooms must contain?” I managed to stammer out a reply, “Mr. Allison does not consider that his rights extend so far. I have never crossed the drawing-room floor.” “Well! that is carrying honor to an extreme. I am afraid I should not be able to suppress my curiosity to that extent. Is he afraid of the old lady returning unexpectedly and catching him?” I could not echo her laugh; I could not even smile; I could only pucker up my brows as if angry. “Everything is kept in shape, so that if she does return she will find the house comfortable,” I said; then, with a rising sense of having by this speech suggested a falsehood, I hastily dropped the topic, and, with an entire change of manner, remarked, airily: