roperty: it was starvation. Poor little
Virginie--pretty creature she was too!--would have been alive to-day,
there's no doubt of it, if she could have had proper food and medicines.
And there's his daughter! What kind of a life has she had for a girl
with such blood in her veins? Why, if I should tell you the sum on which
that child has supported herself and her father in Baltimore and here
since her mother died, you wouldn't believe me. And Laidley did nothing
for them. Not a penny! Under the circumstances it was a crime for him to
be alive."

"What were the circumstances?" asked Miss Fleming.

"The property, you understand, was old Morot's--Morot of New Orleans.
Virginie was his only child: she married Swendon, and her father came to
live with them in Baltimore. The two men were at odds from the first
day. Old Morot was a keen, pig-headed business-man: he knew nothing
outside of the tobacco-trade; worked in the counting-house all day; his
one idea of pleasure was to swill port and terrapin half the night.
Swendon--Well, you know the captain. He was a brilliant young fellow in
those days, full of ideas that never came to anything--an invention
every month which was to make his fortune. They quarreled, of course the
wife sided with her husband, and Morot, in a fit of rage, left the whole
property to his nephew, Will Laidley. When he was on his deathbed,
however, the old man relented and sent for Laidley. It was too late to
alter the will, but he charged him to do justice to his daughter.
Laidley has told me that much himself. But it never occurred to him that
justice meant anything more than to keep the estate, and allow it at his
death to revert to Jane and her father."

"Well, well!" cried Mr. Waring hastily, "that cannot be far off now.
Laidley is so nearly a thing of the past, judge, that we might afford to
bury his faults with him, decently out of sight."

"I can't put out of sight the years of want for Virginie and her child
while he was throwing their money to the dogs in every gambling-hell in
Baltimore and New York. Why, the story was so well known that when he
came down to Richmond he was not recognized, sir! Not recognized. He
felt it. Left the county like a whipped cur."

"Yet, legally, the money was his own," remarked Cornelia.

"Oh, legally, I grant you! But morally, now--" The judge had counted on
Miss Fleming's sympathy in his story. Only the day before he had seen
the tears come to her eyes over