tantly at work at a thing. This will be
my last absence on business, Millicent; henceforward I shall be able to
be always with you."

"Well, now that I know what you have been doing all this time, Mark, I
must admit that you have been very good to have been with us as much as
you have. I often used to wonder how you passed your time. Of course I
knew that you were trying to find that man out, but it did not seem to
me that you could be always at that, and I never dreamt that you had
become a regular detective. I am very glad I did not know it till a
short time before you gave it up. In the first place, I should have
been horrified, and, in the second place, I should have been constantly
uneasy about you. However, as this is to be the last time, I will let
you go without grumbling."

"By the way, Millicent, what do you wish me to say about our engagement?
I don't see that there is the slightest occasion for us to keep up the
farce of your being Miss Conyers any longer. You cannot be married under
a false name, you know, and now that you have escaped what your father
was so afraid of, and are going to be married for love and not for
money, I don't see why there should be any more mystery about it."

"But how would you account for my having been called Conyers all this
time?"

"I should simply tell the truth; that your father, having a great fear
that you might be married for money, left the estate to my father, to
be held by him until you came of age, and that it was at his particular
request that you were brought up simply as his ward, and dropped the
family name and passed by your two Christian names. I should say that
we have all been aware for a long time of the facts of the case, and
I should also say that your father had left a very large fortune in
addition to the estate between us, and had expressed a hope that we
should, when the time came, marry each other."

"Then people will think that we have only married to keep the fortune
together, Mark."

"Well, my dear, I don't suppose there are a great many people who will
be interested in the matter, and those who get to know you will see at
once that as far as I am concerned, there was no great difficulty in
falling in with your father's ideas, while, on the other hand, they may
consider that you made a noble sacrifice of yourself in agreeing to the
plan."

"Nonsense, sir. I am not going to flatter you, as no doubt you expect;
but, at any rate, I am perfectly