“When,” I asked, “did you first see the change in Mrs. Packard?”

“On Tuesday afternoon at about this time.”

“What had happened on that day?  Had she been out?”

“Yes, I think she told me later that she had been out.”

“Do you know where?”

“To some concert, I believe.  I did not press her with questions, Miss Saunders; I am a poor inquisitor.”

Click, click; the machine was working admirably.

“Have you reason to think,” I now demanded, “that she brought her unhappiness in with her, when she returned from that concert?”

“No; for when I returned home myself, as I did earlier than usual that night, I heard her laughing with the child in the nursery.  It was afterward, some few minutes afterward, that I came upon her sitting in such a daze of misery, that she did not recognize me when I spoke to her.  I thought it was a passing mood at the time; she is a sensitive woman and she had been reading—­I saw the book lying on the floor at her side; but when, having recovered from her dejection—­a dejection, mind you, which she would neither acknowledge nor explain—­she accompanied me out to dinner, she showed even more feeling on our return, shrinking unaccountably from leaving the carriage and showing, not only in this way but in others, a very evident distaste to reenter her own house.  Now, whatever hold I still retain upon her is of so slight a nature that I am afraid every day she will leave me.”

“Leave you!”

My fingers paused; my astonishment had got the better of me.

“Yes; it is as bad as that.  I don’t know what day you will send me a telegram of three words, ‘She has gone.’  Yet she loves me, really and truly loves me.  That is the mystery of it.  More than this, her very heart-strings are knit up with those of our child.”

“Mayor Packard,”—­I had resumed work,—­“was any letter delivered to her that day?”

“That I can not say.”

Fact one for me to establish.

“The wives of men like you—­men much before the world, men in the thick of strife, social and political—­often receive letters of a very threatening character.”

“She would have shown me any such, if only to put me on my guard.  She is physically a very brave woman and not at all nervous.”

“Those letters sometimes assume the shape of calumny.  Your character may have been attacked.”

“She believes in my character and would have given me an opportunity to vindicate myself.  I have every confidence in my wife’s sense of justice.”

I experienced a thrill of admiration for the appreciation he evinced in those words.  Yet I pursued the subject resolutely.

“Have you an enemy, Mayor Packard?  Any real and downright enemy capable of a deep and serious attempt at destroying your happiness?”

“None that I know of, Miss Saunders.  I have political enemies, of course men, who, influenced by party feeling, are not above attacking methods and possibly my official reputation; but personal ones—­wretches willing to stab me in my home-life and affections, that I can not believe.  My life has been as an open book.  I have harmed no man knowingly and, as far as I know, no man has ever cherished a wish to injure me.”