setto, under pressure of his excitement. I would have
argued with him, explained, tried to dissuade him, but Jasper scorned
my temporizing and would have had none of it. His sense of justice
blazed high within him and his words leaped forth, a very avalanche of
scorn and wrath. Anthony heard him through without replying, then
turned on his heel and went out. Our partnership was at an end. Later
we heard that he had become involved with his scheme even before he
spoke to us, that he had made himself liable for a sum of money, and
that, to pay it--don't wince, Jasper, these children must know the
truth--to pay it he forged Felix Brighton's name.

"There is something very terrible in the sudden destruction of your
confidence in some one you have loved and trusted. Anthony is greatly
changed now, although there is still a little of his old charm left.
Yet you would not think of him as some one who had been an intimate
part of our lives, a comrade whose cleverness we admired and whose
honesty we had never doubted. And then he was suddenly blotted out of
our existence. The wrong he had done was hushed up, he disappeared
somewhere in the West, and it seemed that we were never to hear of him
again. The years went by, Jasper's mother and then our Uncle Felix
went from us. He had given me the lands on the west side of the river,
since I was already owner of the cottage, the Windy Hill, and the bees
that he had taught me to tend and love. To Jasper he had given the
yellow stone house that had been like home for us all and his intimate
possessions, the treasures it contained. He had given him also the
drained farm lands by the river, a legacy that was an occupation in
itself. He had seen that Jasper's bent was not really for the law, but
that his best calling was the care of such an estate as this. More
years passed, I became more and more absorbed in my own work down in
the seaport town that has become a city, spending my holidays and my
vacations in caring for the bees, not seeing Jasper so often, for he
was over-busy also. And then Anthony came home.

"Whatever he had been doing in all this time we have no way of
knowing. He had altered greatly, so that there seemed nothing left of
his old self except his cleverness, some lingering affection for the
place where he had been happy as a boy, and that old habit of coveting
what other people had. He came back with a claim to make, one that
went back as far as the day when Reuben and