ing a
light.

Herbert watched with sympathetic interest while Traverse tore open the
envelope and examined its contents.

They were, as Herbert had anticipated, letters from the mother and the
betrothed of Traverse--letters that had arrived and been intercepted,
from time to time, for the preceding two years.

There were blanks, also, directed in a hand strange to Traverse, but
familiar to Herbert as that of Old Hurricane, and those blanks inclosed
drafts upon a New Orleans bank, payable to the order of Traverse Rocke.

Traverse pushed all these latter aside with scarcely a glance and not a
word of inquiry, and began eagerly to examine the long-desired,
long-withheld letters from the dear ones at home.

His cheek flamed to see that every seal was broken, and the fresh aroma
of every heart-breathed word inhaled by others, before they reached
himself.

"Look here, Herbert! look here! Is not this insufferable? Every fond
word of my mother, every delicate and sacred expression of--of regard
from Clara, all read by the profane eyes of that man!"

"That man is on his deathbed, Traverse, and you must forgive him! He
has restored your letters."

"Yes, after their sacred privacy has been profaned! Oh!"

Traverse handed his mother's letters over to Herbert, that his foster
brother might read them, but Clara's "sacred epistles" were kept to
himself.

"What are you laughing at?" inquired Traverse, looking up from his
page, and detecting Herbert with a smile upon his face.

"I am thinking that you are not as generous as you were some few years
since, when you would have given me Clara herself; for now you will not
even let me have a glimpse of her letters!"

"Have they not been already sufficiently published?" said Traverse,
with an almost girlish smile and blush.

When those cherished letters were all read and put away, Traverse
stooped down and "fished up" from amidst envelopes, strings and waste
paper another set of letters which proved to be the blanks inclosing
the checks, of various dates, which Herbert recognized as coming
anonymously from Old Hurricane.

"What in the world is the meaning of all this, Herbert? Have I a nabob
uncle turned up anywhere, do you think? Look here!--a hundred
dollars--and a fifty, and another--all drafts upon the Planters' Bank,
New Orleans, drawn in my favor and signed by Largent Dor, bankers!--I,
that haven't had five dollars at a time to call my own for the last two
years! Here