ted to judge him harshly. "I might really hate him so
long as he was absent from me, and yet if he came again and looked at me
in that way for a single instant, I know that, in spite of my
resolution, I would throw myself into his arms." And she felt that she
despised herself for a bondage against which she struggled as hopelessly
as a bird caught in a fowler's net.

Of the two ways which remained to her, she chose, in the end, the course
which appeared to her to be the least ungenerous. She would not read the
letter--the opening and the closing sentences she had seen by
accident--for, when all was said, it had not been written for her eyes;
and it struck her, as she brooded over it, that there would be positive
disloyalty in thus stealing in upon the secrets of Kemper's past. No,
she would place it in his hands, she determined finally, still unread;
and in so doing she would not only defeat the purpose of the sender, but
would prove to him as well as to herself that her faith in him was as
unalterable as her love. After all to trust was easier than to distrust,
for the brief agony of her indecision had brought to her the knowledge
that the way of suspicion is the way of death.

And so when he came a little later she gave the letter, at which she
had not again looked, into his hands. "Here is something that reached me
only this morning," she said. "It is not worth thinking of, and I have
read only the first and the last sentence."

At her words he unfolded the paper, throwing a mere casual glance, as he
did so, upon the thin foreign envelope, which appeared to convey to him
no hint of its significant contents.

Then, after a hurried skimming of the first page, he turned back again
and carefully studied the address in a mystification which was pierced
presently by a flash of light.

"By Jove, so she's heard it!" he exclaimed; and the instant afterward he
added in a kind of grudging admiration, "Well, she's a devil!"

The incident appeared suddenly to engross him in a manner that Laura had
not expected, and he stooped to examine the postmark with an attention
which gave her, while she watched him, a queer sense of being left out
quite in the cold.

"But why, in thunder, should she care?" he demanded.

"She?" there was no trouble in her voice, only an indifferent question.

"Oh, it's Jennie Alta, of course--she's perfectly capable of such a
thing." Then, reaching out, he drew Laura into his arms with a
confidence