e I'd name the
baby myself and I did: I named the little girl--and a mighty cute
youngster she was, too--I named her Elizabeth--favorite name of
mine;--just the mother, lying there in bed, and the man and woman that
kept the boarding-house in the room. The mother said she wanted to do
something for me; and as I was leaving her she pulled this book out and
made me take it."

"I suppose it was a favorite book of hers and all that," suggested Dan.

"I don't think anybody had ever opened that book," replied Ware,
smiling. "It was brand-new--not a scratch on it."

"And afterward?" asked Allen, anxious for the rest of the story.

"Well, sir, I passed through there four years afterward and found the
same people living in the little cottage there at that settlement.
Strange to say, that woman had stayed there a couple of years after the
baby was born. Hadn't any place to go, I reckon. Nobody ever went near
her, they said; but finally she picked up and left; took the baby with
her. She had never been well afterward, and finally, seeing she hadn't
long to live, she struck out for home. Wanted to die among her own
people, maybe. I don't know the rest of the story, Allen. What I've told
you is all I know,--it's like finding a magazine in a country hotel
where you haven't anything to read and dip into the middle of a serial
story. I never told anybody about that but my wife. I had a feeling that
if that woman took such pains to bury herself up there in the wilderness
it wasn't my business to speak of it. But it's long ago now--most
everything that an old chap like me knows is!"

Thatcher rose and crossed to the stove and took the book. He turned it
over and scrutinized it carefully, scanned the blank pages and the
silk-faced lids in the glow from the stove, and then handed it to Allen.

"What does that say there, that small gold print on the inside of the
cover?"

"That's the binder's name--Z. Fenelsa."

Allen closed the book, passed his hand over the smooth covers, and
handed it back to Ware.

"What did you say the woman's name was, Ware?" asked Thatcher.

"Didn't say, but the name she went by up there was Forbes. She told me
it was an assumed name. The people she stayed with told me they never
knew any better."

Several minutes passed in which no one spoke. The minister lapsed into
one of his deep reveries. Thatcher stood just behind him peering into
the fire. Suddenly he muttered under his breath and almost inaudibly