“It’s on your side!” said I.

“No, it’s on yours!” said she.

“You’re pounding yourself to fool me,” cried I.

“You’re pounding yourself to frighten me,” sobbed she.

And we nearly had a quarrel.  The sound continued with more or less intermission till daybreak.  Allis fell asleep, but I spent the time in appropriate reflections.

Early in the morning I removed the button from Miss Fellows’s door.  She never knew anything about it.

I believe, however, that I had the fairness to exculpate her in my secret heart from any trickish connection with the disturbances of that night.

“Just keep quiet about this little affair,” I said to my wife; “we shall come across an explanation in time, and may never have any more of it.”

We kept quiet, and for five days so did “the spirits,” as Miss Fellows was pleased to pronounce the trip-hammers.

The fifth day I came home early, as it chanced, from the office.  Miss Fellows was writing letters in the parlor.  Allis, upstairs, was sorting and putting away the weekly wash.  I came into the room and sat down by the register to watch her.  I always liked to watch her sitting there on the floor with the little heaps of linen and cotton stuff piled like blocks of snow about her, and her pink hands darting in and out of the uncertain sleeves that were just ready to give way in the gathers, trying the stockings’ heels briskly, and testing the buttons with a little jerk.

She laid aside some under-clothing presently from the rest.  “It will not be needed again this winter,” she observed, “and had better go into the cedar closet.”  The garments, by the way, were marked and numbered in indelible ink.  I heard her run over the figures in a busy, housekeeper’s undertone, before carrying them into the closet.  She locked the closet door, I think, for I remember the click of the key.  If I remember accurately, I stepped into the hall after that to light a cigar, and Alison flitted to and fro with her clothes, dropping the baby’s little white stockings every step or two, and anathematizing them daintily—­within orthodox bounds, of course.  In about five minutes she called me; her voice was sharp and alarmed.

“Come quick!  O Fred, look here!  All those clothes that I locked into the cedar closet are out here on the bed!”

“My dear wife,” I blandly observed, as I sauntered into the room, “too much of Gertrude Fellows hath made thee mad.  Let me see the clothes!”

She pointed to the bed.  Some white clothing lay upon it, folded in an ugly way, to represent a corpse, with crossed hands.

“Is it meant for a joke, Alison?  You did it yourself, I suppose!”

“Fred!  I have not touched it with the tip of my little finger!”

“Gertrude, then?”

“Gertrude is in the parlor writing.”

So she was.  I called her up.  She looked surprised and troubled.