girl’s burial.

So the beautiful mystery of Central Park was not sent to a medical college nor to the Potter’s Field. The next morning Penelope accompanied Richard in his coupé, and Mrs. Louise Van Brunt, her aunt, who had in her carriage two charitable old lady friends, followed the sombre hearse in its slow journey across the bridge to Brooklyn. In a quiet graveyard on the outskirts of the city the dead girl was lowered into the earth.

Penelope was greatly wrought up over the case. All the way to the graveyard she was moody and silent. Seeing that she was not[Page 40] inclined to talk, Richard too sat silent and thoughtful.

[Page 40]

Added to her interest in the dead girl, the evident suspicions entertained against Richard had preyed upon Penelope’s mind. While she never doubted Richard’s innocence in the affair, still ugly thoughts concerning his careless nature, and the recalled rumors of affairs with actresses, of more or less renown, which the newspapers darkly hinted at, almost set her wild. Could it be possible that he had known the girl, or ever seen her before they found her dead?

She recalled his excitement when he leaned down and for the first time saw the face of the girl as she sat on the bench. The officer had laid great stress on Dick’s excited manner, and to Penelope, as she looked back, it seemed suggestive of more than he had acknowledged.

“And I love him, I love him,” she cried to herself during the long ride to the cemetery,[Page 41] “and with this horrible suspicion hanging over him I could never marry him; I could never be happy if I did. I can never be happy if I don’t. If we only knew something about it; if only people did not hint things; if I could only crush the horrible idea that he knows more than he told!”

[Page 41]

They dismounted, after driving into the cemetery, and walked silently across the green; winding in and out among the grassy and flowered beds and white stones which marked all that had once been life—hope.

An unknown but Christian minister stood waiting them at the open grave. Penelope glanced at him and at the workmen, who left the shade of a tree near-by when they saw the party approaching, and came forward with faces void of any feeling but that of impudent curiosity. The minister repeated the burial service very softly, as the coffin was lowered into the earth. Penelope’s throat felt 

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