CHAPTER XXI.
THE VEILED LADY As soon as that huddled mass of womanhood that was Mrs.De Peyster had become sufficiently reanimated to be able to think, its first thought came in the form of an unuttered wail.
She was dead! She was to be buried! She could never come home again! Or if she did come home, what a scandal! A scandal out-scandalizing anything of which she had ever dreamed! A scandal worse ten times than the very grave itself! With loose face and glazed eyes she stared at Matilda while the latter stammered out disjointed details of the past week's happenings.

As for Mr.Jack's lark in dwelling surreptitiously with his wife in his mother's house, not a breath of that had reached the public.

With Mr.
Pyecroft's aid, and Judge Harvey's, he had managed this well.

He had told the reporters that he had been quietly married over three weeks before, that he and his wife had been living in seclusion, and that on learning of his mother's demise they had come to the house to direct the obsequies....

Those Paris police were trying to solve the mystery of what had become of Mrs.De Peyster's trunks....