tioned back, with a note of personal
grievance in her voice.

"I'm not very well acquainted with his style. Then, you think he _did_
write it? Of course, there are always various opinions. But I understood
you thought he was burned in that accident last winter."

"Now, _doctor_!" said Mrs. Munger, with the pout which Putney said
always made him want to kill her. "You're just trying to tease me; I
know you are. I'm going to drive right in and see Mrs. Morrell. _She_
will tell me what you think."

"I don't believe you can see her," said the doctor. "She isn't at all
well."

"Oh, I'm sorry for that. I don't understand what excuse she has, though,
with a physician for her husband. You must turn hom[oe]opathy. Dr.
Morrell, do you think it's true that Jack Wilmington will offer himself
to Sue Northwick, now that it's come to the worst with her? Wouldn't it
be romantic?"

"Very," said the doctor. He craned his head out of the buggy, as if to
see whether he could safely drive into the ditch, and pass Mrs. Munger.
He said politely, as he started, "Don't disturb yourself! I can get by."

She sent a wail of reproach after him, and then continued toward South
Hatboro'. As she passed the lodge at the gate of the Northwick avenue,
where the sisters now lived, she noted that the shades were closely
drawn. They were always drawn on the side toward the street, but Mrs.
Munger thought it interesting that she had never noticed it before, and
in the dearth of material she made the most of it, both for her own
emotion, and for the sensation of others when she reached South
Hatboro'.

Behind the drawn shades that Mrs. Munger noted, Adeline Northwick sat
crying over the paper that Elbridge Newton had pushed under the door
that morning. It was limp from the nervous clutch and tremor of her
hands, and wet with her tears; but she kept reading her father's letter
in it, and trying to puzzle out of it some hope or help. "He must be
crazy, he must be crazy," she moaned, more to herself than to Suzette,
who sat rigidly and silently by. "He couldn't have been so cruel, if he
had been in his right mind; he couldn't! He was always so good to us,
and so thoughtful; he must have known that we had given him up for dead,
long ago; and he has let us go on grieving for him all this time. It's
just as if he had come back from death, and the first he did was to tell
us that everything they said against him was true, and that everything
we said and bel