"No; you bet! I didn't try to--it would have haunted me forever."
"What do you mean?"
"This--I mean it was that GIRL THE BOX BELONGED TO! She's dead somewhere--as you'll find out sooner or later--AND HAS COME BACK FOR HER CLOTHES! I've often heard of such things before."
Despite his coolness, at this corroboration of his own experience, and impressed by Grey's unmistakable awe, a thrill went through the president. For an instant he was silent.
"That will do, boys," he said finally. "It's a queer story; but remember, it's all the more reason now for our keeping our secret.
As for those things, I'll remove them quietly and at once."
But he did not.
On the contrary, prolonging his stay at the hotel with plausible reasons, he managed to frequently visit the committee room or its vicinity, at different and unsuspected hours of the day and night.
More than that, he found opportunities to visit the office, and under pretexts of business connected with the economy of the hotel management, informed himself through Miss Marsh on many points. A few of these details naturally happened to refer to herself, her prospects, her tastes, and education. He learned incidentally, what he had partly known, that her father had been in better circumstances, and that she had been gently nurtured--though of this she made little account in her pride in her own independence and devotion to her duties. But in his own persistent way he also made private notes of the breadth of her shoulders, the size of her waist, her height, length of her skirt, her movements in walking, and other apparently extraneous circumstances. It was natural that he acquired some supplemental facts,--that her eyes, under her eye-glasses, were a tender gray, and touched with the melancholy beauty of near-sightedness; that her face had a sensitive mobility beyond the mere charm of color, and like most people lacking this primitive and striking element of beauty, what was really fine about her escaped the first sight. As, for instance, it was only by bending over to examine her accounts that he found that her indistinctive hair was as delicate as floss silk and as electrical.