“What is the matter now?” she asked. “What does Mr. Gryce want, Lucetta?”
Mr. Gryce himself spoke.
“I simply want her,” said he, “to assist me with a clue from her inmost thoughts. When I was in your house,” he explained with a praiseworthy consideration for me and my relations to these girls for which I cannot be too grateful, “I saw in this young lady something which convinced me that, as a dweller in this lane, she was not without her suspicions as to the secret cause of the fatal mysteries which I have been sent here to clear up. Today I have frankly accused her of this, and asked her to confide in me. But she refuses to do so, Miss Loreen. Yet her face shows even at this moment that my old eyes were not at fault in my reading of her. She does suspect somebody, and it is not Mother Jane.”
“How can you say that?” began Lucetta, but the eyes which Loreen that moment turned upon her seemed to trouble her, for she did not attempt to say any more—only looked equally obstinate and distressed.
“If Lucetta suspects anyone,” Loreen now steadily remarked, “then I think she ought to tell you who it is.”
“You do. Then perhaps you—” commenced Mr. Gryce—“can persuade her as to her duty,” he finished, as he saw her head rise in protest of what he evidently had intended to demand.
“Lucetta will not yield to persuasion,” was her quiet reply. “Nothing short of conviction will move the sweetest-natured but the most determined of all my mother’s children. What she thinks is right, she will do. I will not attempt to influence her.”
Mr. Gryce, with one comprehensive survey of the two, hesitated no longer. I saw the rising of the blood into his forehead, which always precedes the beginning of one of his great moves, and, filled with a sudden excitement, I awaited his next words as a tyro awaits the first unfolding of the plan he has seen working in the brain of some famous strategist.
“Miss Lucetta,”—his very tone was changed, changed in a way to make us all start notwithstanding the preparation his momentary silence had given us—“I have been thus pressing and perhaps rude in my appeal, because of something which has come to my knowledge which cannot but make you of all persons extremely anxious as to the meaning of this terrible mystery. I am an old man, and you will not mind my bluntness. I have been told—and your agitation convinces me there is truth in the report—that you have a lover, a Mr. Ostrander—”
“Ah!” She had sunk as if crushed by one overwhelming blow to the earth. The eyes, the lips, the whole pitiful face that was upturned to us, remain in my memory today as the most terrible and yet the most moving spectacle that has come into my by no means uneventful life. “What has happened to him? Quick, quick, tell me!”
For answer Mr. Gryce drew out a telegram.
“From the master of the ship on which he was to sail,” he explained. “It asks if Mr. Ostrander left this town on Tuesday last, as no news has been received of him.”
“Loreen! Loreen! When he left us he passed down that way!” shrieked the girl, rising like a spirit and pointing east toward Deacon Spear’s. “He is gone! He is lost! But his fate shall not remain a mystery. I will dare its solution. I—I—Tonight you will hear from me again.”
And without another glance at any of us she turned and fled toward the house.
XXXIV
Conditions
But in another moment she was back, her eyes dilated and her whole person exhaling a terrible purpose.
“Do not look at me, do not notice me!” she cried, but in a voice so hoarse no one but Mr. Gryce could fully understand her. “I am for no one’s eyes but God’s. Pray that he may have mercy upon me.” Then as she saw us all instinctively fall back, she controlled herself, and, pointing toward Mother Jane’s cottage, said more distinctly: “As for those men, let them dig. Let them dig the whole day long. Secrecy must be kept, a secrecy so absolute that not even the birds of the air must see that our thoughts range beyond the forty rods surrounding Mother Jane’s cottage.”
She turned and would have fled away for the second time, but Mr. Gryce stopped her. “You have set yourself a task beyond your strength. Can you perform it?”
“I can perform it,” she said. “If Loreen does not talk, and I am allowed to spend the day in solitude.”
I had never seen Mr. Gryce so agitated—no, not when he left Olive Randolph’s bedside after an hour of vain pleading. “But to wait all day! Is it necessary for you to wait all day?”
“It is necessary.” She spoke like an automaton. “Tonight at twilight, when the sun is setting, meet me at the great tree just where the road turns. Not a minute sooner, not an hour later. I will be calmer then.” And waiting now for nothing, not for a word from Loreen nor a detaining touch from Mr. Gryce, she flew away for the second time. This time Loreen followed her.
“Well, that is the hardest thing I ever had to do,” said Mr. Gryce, wiping his forehead and speaking in a tone of real grief and anxiety. “Do you think her delicate frame can stand it? Will she survive this day and carry through whatever it is she has set herself to accomplish?”
“She has no organic disease,” said I, “but she loved that young man very much, and the day will be a terrible one to her.”
Mr. Gryce sighed.
“I wish I had not been obliged to resort to such means,” said he, “but women like that only work under excitement, and she does know the secret of this affair.”
“Do you mean,” I demanded, almost aghast, “that you have deceived her
