She began by giving him another exaggerated description of Salome’s meeting with the strange man, which, she stated, Evelyn had witnessed by the merest chance, and added that she had afterward interviewed him and tried to ascertain the secret of his familiarity with Salome. The man was insolent and evasive—tried to make conditions upon the compliance with which he would make some mysterious revelations about the girl. Of course such terms were indignantly resented, and then they tried to talk the matter over with Salome and induce her to explain it. She utterly refused and seemed greatly annoyed, even angry, to learn that her interview with the stranger was known to them. After that she had seemed sullen and unhappy, and was apparently only too glad to avail herself of the opportunity to leave the house on Madison Avenue when his message had come telling her to go to the —— Hotel. Even then they had invited and urged her to come to the Thirty-fourth Street residence with them, but she had curtly refused and parted with them in the coldest manner imaginable. Madam concluded her fallacious account by saying that she had since been to the —— Hotel to call upon Salome and see if she was comfortably situated, when to her astonishment she learned that she had not been there at all. “It’s the greatest mystery in the world,” she wrote, “what can have become of the poor girl! She was far from being well, although not really ill, having been confined to her bed only one day since your departure, but, of course, we are very much exercised as to what has become of her. Do you suppose—can it be possible that she has gone with—that strange man whom she met—can he have had anything to do with her mysterious disappearance?” This letter dispatched, madam felt that she had driven an effectual wedge toward the separation of her son and his despised wife, and she tried to school herself to patience while waiting for the result. A week passed, and one morning upon opening the paper madam’s eyes fell upon the black head-lines announcing a new and heart-sickening horror. A disastrous fire had occurred the previous night in a certain part of the city, and a great lodging-house for working girls had been burned to the ground. A dozen lives had been lost, the names of those whose bodies had been found being given, while several were missing. Madam ran her eye down the list, and she suddenly grew pale with horror as she read, midway of the column, the name “Miss S. Howland, age about twenty-one.” “Can it be Salome!” she breathed with livid lips. She sat staring blankly at the name for several minutes, cold chills creeping over her and tingling to her finger-tips and almost paralyzing her from head to foot. A feeling of guilt and remorse blanched her face and sent a look of terror into her eyes, for—if Salome had perished in that dreadful way she knew that she was, in a measure, responsible for her fate.