with Lois Kirkwood. Many declared after the event that they had
"always known" that Jack was a bad lot. Those who sought to account for
Lois Kirkwood's infatuation remembered suddenly that he and Lois had
been boy and girl sweethearts and that she had once been engaged to
marry him. It was explained that his temperament and hers were
harmonious, and that Kirkwood, for all his fine abilities, was a
sober-minded fellow, without Holton's zest for the world's gayety. Any
further details--the countless trifles with which for half a dozen years
the gossips of Montgomery regaled themselves--are not for this writing.

Many years had passed--or, to be explicit, exactly sixteen. One of the
first results of the incident had been the immediate elimination of the
Holton half of the firm name by which the bank had long been known.
Jack's brother William organized the First National Bank, toward which
Mr. Amzi Montgomery's spectacles pointed several times daily, as
already noted. Samuel, the oldest son of the first Holton, tried a
variety of occupations before he was elected Secretary of State. He
never fully severed his ties with Montgomery, retaining a house in town
and the farm on Sugar Creek. After retiring from office, he became a
venturesome speculator, capitalizing his wide political acquaintance in
the sale of shares in all manner of mining and plantation companies, and
dying suddenly, had left his estate in a sad clutter.

In due course of time it became known that Lois Kirkwood had divorced
her husband at long range, from a Western state where such matters were
at the time transacted expeditiously, and a formal announcement of her
marriage to Holton subsequently appeared in the Montgomery "Evening
Star."

The day after his wife's departure Kirkwood left his home and did not
enter it again. It was said by romanticists among the local gossips that
he had touched nothing, leaving it exactly as it had been, and that he
always carried the key in his pocket as a reminder of his sorrow. Phil
was passed back and forth among her aunts, _seriatim_, until she went to
live with her father, in a rented house far from the original roof-tree.

Even in practicing the most rigid economy of space some reference must
be made to the attitude of Lois Kirkwood's sisters toward her as a
sinning woman. Their amazement had yielded at once to righteous
indignation. It was enough that she had sinned against Heaven; but that
she should have brought