an's voice rebelled. She could read aloud adverse opinions
upon her common sense, her judgment, or her pride, but to impugn her
penmanship was to commit the unforgivable.

"I think Nora is distinctly insulting," she declared.

"No!" Madigan laughed wrathfully. "Do you, now? Why, what has she said?
Only that you're a beggar, and I'm a coward as well as a beggar, because
I don't dare to beg in my own name."

"Does she say that?" exclaimed the literal Miss Madigan, shocked.
"Where?" Her eyes sought the letter again.

"'Where'! Thousand devils--'where'!" Madigan tore it from her and threw
it to the floor, stamping upon it in a frenzy.

Sighing, Miss Madigan leaned her head on her hand. It was hard enough to
find one's most hopeful appeal wasted, without Francis's flying into
such a rage.

A silence followed.

"Look here, Anne,"--Madigan's voice was manifestly struggling to be
calm,--"you must quit this infernal letter-writing. How could you write
to Miles Madigan for charity, knowing that he cheated me out of my share
of the Tomboy? Half the mine was mine. You know that, and yet you hurt
my--"

"I fail to see," responded Miss Madigan, with dignity, "why I should
not write to my own relatives; why I should not try, for my nieces'
sake, to knit close again the raveled ties which your eccentricities
have--"

"In order to get a box of old duds sent clear from Ireland!"

"Has Nora sent a box?" asked Miss Madigan, eager as a child. "You see,
my letter did touch her, in spite of herself. And they won't be old
duds. They'll be handsome garments, Francis, just the thing for the
girls' winter wardrobe. Now that Nora's in mourning--"

With a crash that sent Miss Madigan's sensitive-plant rolling from its
stand to the floor, Madigan banged the door behind him as he fled.

Miss Madigan flew to the rescue, and she had begun to scoop up the
scattered earth when her eye lighted upon a line at the end of Nora's
letter:

As you know, Miles had only a life-interest in the
estate. At his death everything went to Miles Morgan.
Perhaps Anne would do well to apply to him. The little
matter of her never having seen him would not, of
course, stand in her way.

"Of course not. Why should it?" Miss Madigan asked herself.

She knelt down upon the floor in the midst of the debris and took from
her pocket the letter that Miles Madigan had never read. With the
slightest change, the recopying of the first page or so