read it, and asked, "May Mr. March see it?"

Tedham nodded, and I took the little paper in turn. The letter was
written in a child's stiff, awkward hand. It was hardly more than a
piteous cry of despairing love. The address was Mrs. Hasketh's, in
Somerville, and the date was about three months after Tedham's
punishment began. "Is that the last you have heard from her?" I asked.

Tedham nodded as he took the letter from me.

"But surely you have heard something more about her in all this time?"
my wife pursued.

"Once from Mrs. Hasketh, to make me promise that I would leave the child
to her altogether, and not write to her, or ask to see her. When I went
to the cemetery to-day, I did not know but I should find her grave,
too."

"Well, it is cruel!" cried my wife. "I will go and see Mrs. Hasketh,
but--you ought to feel yourself that it's hopeless."

"Yes," he admitted. "There isn't much chance unless she should happen to
think the same way you do: that I had suffered enough, and that it was
time to stop punishing me."

My wife looked compassionately at him, and she began with a sympathy
that I have not always known her to show more deserving people, "If it
were a question of that alone it would be very easy. But suppose your
daughter were so situated that it would be--disadvantageous to her to
have it known that you were her father?"

"You mean that I have no right to mend my broken-up life--what there is
left of it--by spoiling hers? I have said that to myself. But then, on
the other hand, I have had to ask myself whether I had any right to keep
her from choosing for herself about it. I sha'n't force myself on her. I
expect to leave her free. But if the child cares for me, as she used to,
hasn't that love--not mine for her, but hers for me--got some rights
too?"

His voice sank almost to a hush, and the last word was scarcely more
than a breathing. "All I want is to know where she is, and to let her
know that I am in the world, and where she can find me. I think she
ought to have a chance to decide."

"I am afraid Mrs. Hasketh may think it would be better, for her sake,
_not_ to have the chance," my wife sighed, and she turned her look from
Tedham upon me, as if she wished me rather than him to answer.

"The only way to find out is to ask her," I answered, non-committally,
and rather more lightly than I felt about it. In fact, the turn the
affair had taken interested me greatly. It involved that awful myster