and not a man who knew nothing about girls, nor how they would feel
when deserted, in a measure, by a father. When they were in the
carriage, she sat on the seat with Charlotte and kept her arm around
her, and looked across almost defiantly at her son.

"It is a terrible strain on the poor little thing, and if we are not
careful she will be down with a fever," she told Randolph, privately,
when they were home.

He laughed. "Take care of her all you want to, mother," he said.

After dinner he went up to the Carroll place. He had his instructions
from Carroll what to do. Some of the creditors were partly satisfied
with the things belonging to the Carrolls; some were taken to the
Anderson house for Charlotte. As for Charlotte herself, she was, in
reality, not so far from the fever which Mrs. Anderson had predicted.
She adored her father. Every day she watched for a letter. At last
Anderson told her as much as he could and not break his word to her
father.

"Your father is perfectly safe, dear," he said, "and he is earning a
great deal of money."

"What is he doing?" asked Charlotte, and her manner showed for the
first time suspicion of her father.

"Something perfectly honest, dear," Anderson replied, simply, "but he
does not want you to know and he does not want the others to know.
You just be contented and brave and make the best of it all."

That was not long before they were married. It had seemed best to
them all that they should not delay long. Mrs. Carroll did not come
to the wedding, because Ina was ill. Anna knew as well as Anderson
what her brother was doing. She had somehow comforted her
sister-in-law without telling her anything, but she did not think it
best to visit Banbridge. She had at times a feeling as if she herself
were doing what her brother was, and the shame and pride together
stung her in the same way. She wrote by every mail to Carroll, and
posted it in another town, and nobody knew. In one of the letters she
told him with an unconcealed glee that his old enemy, the man who had
brought about all this, had had a shock of paralysis.

"He will never speak again," she wrote. "He has become dead while he
is alive. After all, the Lord is just."

Carroll got that letter a few weeks after Charlotte was married. One
Sunday night he made a trip to Banbridge. He was close-shaven; he had
grown very thin; nobody would have recognized him, nobody did
recognize him, although he met several Banbridge p