We
all expressed our sympathy as delicately as possible, and no more was
said upon the subject. Some weeks after this he seemed to have arrived
at that stage of tempered grief at which it becomes a relief to give
sorrow words--to speak of the departed one to sympathizing friends;
for one day he voluntarily began talking of his bereavement, and of
the terrible calamity by which his wife had been deprived of her head!
This sharpened our curiosity to the keenest edge; but of course we
controlled it, hoping he would volunteer some further information with
regard to so singular a misfortune; but when day after day went by and
he did not allude to the matter, we got worked up into a fever of
excitement about it. One evening after Dennison had gone, we held a
kind of political meeting about it, at which all possible and
impossible methods of decapitation were suggested as the ones to which
Mrs. D. probably owed her extraordinary demise. I am sorry to add that
we so far forgot the grave character of the event as to lay small
wagers that it was done this way or that way; that it was accidental
or premeditated; that she had had a hand in it herself or that it was
wrought by circumstances beyond her control. All was mere conjecture,
however; but from that time Dennison, as the custodian of a secret
upon which we had staked our cash, was an object of more than usual
interest.
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