Relieved as to Mrs.Packard, I found my mind immediately reverting to the topic which had before engrossed it, though always before in her connection.

The mystery of the so-called ghosts had been explained, but not the loss of the bonds, which had driven my poor neighbors mad.

This was still a fruitful subject of thought, though I knew that such well-balanced and practical minds as Mayor Packard's or Mr.Steele's would have but little sympathy with the theory ever recurring to me.

Could this money be still in the house ?--the possibility of such a fact worked and worked upon my imagination till I grew as restless as I had been over the mystery of the ghosts and presently quite as ready for action.
Possibly the hurried glimpse I had got of Miss Thankful's countenance a little while before, in the momentary visit she paid to the attic window at which I had been accustomed to see either her or her sister constantly sit, inspired me with my present interest in this old and wearing trouble of theirs and the condition into which it had thrown their minds.

I thought of their nights of broken rest while they were ransacking the rooms below and testing over and over the same boards, the same panels for the secret hiding-place of their lost treasure, of their foolish attempts to scare away all other intruders, and the racking of nerve and muscle which must have attended efforts so out of keeping with their age and infirmities.
It would be natural to regard the whole matter as an hallucination on their part, to disbelieve in the existence of the bonds, and to regard Miss Thankful's whole story to Mrs.Packard as the play of a diseased imagination.
But I could not, would not, carry my own doubts to this extent.