o? Did you notice the handwriting?"

"Why, I was such a little fellow," and he looked up in wonder and
slight concern, "how could I remember? Some letter that somebody had
dropped, perhaps, in taking the rest out of the box. It could not
matter--certainly not now. You would not bring my youthful misdeeds up
against me, would you?" And he turned up a half-comical, half-pitiful
face.

Fortune's first impulse--what was it? She hardly knew. But her second
was that safest, easiest thing--now grown into the habit and refuge of
her whole life--silence. "No, it certainly does not matter now."

A deadly sickness came over her. What if this letter were Robert Roy's,
asking her that question which he said no man ought ever to ask a woman
twice? And she had never seen it--never answered it. So, of course, he
went away. Her whole life--nay, two whole lives--had been destroyed, and
by a mere accident, the aimless mischief of a child's innocent hand. She
could never prove it, but it might have been so. And, alas! alas! God,
the merciful God, had allowed it to be so.

Which is the worst, to wake up suddenly and find that our life has been
wrecked by our own folly, mistake, or sin, or that it has been done for
us either directly by the hand of Providence, or indirectly through some
innocent--nay, possibly not innocent, but intentional--hand? In both
cases the agony is equally sharp--the sharper because irremediable.

All these thoughts, vivid as lightning, and as rapid, darted through poor
Fortune's brain during the few moments that she stood with her hand on
David's shoulder, while he drew from his magpie's nest a heterogeneous
mass of rubbish--pebbles, snail shells, bits of glass and china,
fragments even of broken toys.

"Just look there. What ghosts of my childhood, as people would say! Dead
and buried, though." And he laughed merrily--he in the full tide and
glory of his youth.

Fortune Williams looked down on his happy face. This lad that really
loved her would not have hurt her for the world, and her determination
was made. He should never know any thing. Nobody should ever know any
thing. The "dead and buried" of fifteen years ago must be dead and
buried forever.

"David," she said, "just out of curiosity, put your hand down to the very
bottom of that hole, and see if you can fish up the mysterious letter."

Then she waited, just as one would wait at the edge of some long-closed
grave to see if the