t's the use? You
know what _I_ think: you were a fool to write him that letter."

"Don't, Steve; please don't."

"Ugh!"

"Don't you know he didn't get the letter? I was so nervous and
over-wrought that I misdirected it."

"Pooh! Has he ever stayed away from you so long before? Or his precious
mother, either? Why doesn't she come to see you? She scarcely missed a
day before this happened. Nonsense! I guess he got it all right."

"Steve, stop! stop! Don't dare speak like that. Do you realize what you
are insinuating? You don't believe it! You know you don't! Shame on you!
I'm ashamed of my brother! No! not another word of that kind, or I shall
leave the room."

She had risen to her feet. He looked at her determined face and turned
away.

"Oh, well," he muttered, sullenly, "maybe you're right. I don't say
you're not. Perhaps he didn't get the letter. You sent it to his office,
and he may have been called out of town. But his mother--"

"Mrs. Dunn was not well when I last saw her. She may be ill."

"Perhaps. But if you're so sure about them, why not let it go at that?
What's the use of fretting?"

"I was not thinking of them--then."

As a matter of fact, she had been thinking of her uncle, Elisha Warren.
As the time dragged by, she thought of him more and more--not as the
uncouth countryman whose unwelcome presence had been forced into her
life; nor as the hypocrite whose insult to her father's memory she
never could forgive or whose double-dealing had been, as she thought,
revealed; but as the man who, with the choke in his voice and the tears
in his eyes, bade her remember that, whenever she needed help, he was
ready and glad to give it.

She did not doubt Malcolm's loyalty. Her brother's hints and
insinuations found no echo in her thoughts. In the note which she had
written her fiance she told of the loss of their fortune, though not of
her father's shame. That she could not tell; nor did she ask Malcolm to
come to her--her pride would not permit that. She wrote simply of her
great trouble and trusted the rest to him. That he had not come was
due--so she kept repeating to herself--solely to the fact that he had
not received her letter. She knew that was it--she knew it. And yet--and
yet he did not come.

So, in her loneliness and misery, her guardian's words returned again
and again to her memory: "Sometimes when things look all right they turn
out to be all wrong. If ever there comes a time like that to