gh Harriet had never believed that Eaton had been concerned in the
attack upon her father, her denial of it had been checked and stilled
because he would not even defend himself. She had not known what to
think; she had seemed to herself to be waiting with her thoughts in
abeyance; until he should be cleared, she had tried not to let herself
think more about Eaton than was necessary. Now that her father himself
had cleared Eaton of that suspicion, her feelings had altered from mere
disbelief that he had injured her father to recollection that Mr.
Warden had spoken of him only as one who himself had been greatly
injured. Eaton was involved with her father in some way; she refused
to believe he was against her father, but clearly he was not with him.
How could he be involved, then, unless the injury he had suffered was
some such act of man against man as these letters and statements
represented? She looked carefully through all the contents of the
envelopes, but she could not find anything which helped her.

She pushed the letters away, then, and sat thinking. Mr. Warden, who
appeared to have known more about Eaton than any one else, had taken
Eaton's side; it was because he had been going to help Eaton that Mr.
Warden had been killed. Would not her father be ready to help Eaton,
then, if he knew as much about him as Mr. Warden had known? But Mr.
Warden, apparently, had kept what he knew even from his own wife; and
Eaton was now keeping it from every one--her father included. She felt
that her father had understood and appreciated all this long before
herself--that it was the reason for his attitude toward Eaton on the
train and, in part, the cause of his considerate treatment of him all
through. She sensed for the first time how great her father's
perplexity must be; but she felt, too, how terrible the injustice must
have been that Eaton had suffered, since he himself did not dare to
tell it even to her father and since, to hide it, other men did not
stop short of double murder.

So, instead of being estranged by Eaton's manner to her father, she
felt an impulse of feeling toward him flooding her, a feeling which she
tried to explain to herself as sympathy. But it was not just sympathy;
she would not say even to herself what it was.

She got up suddenly and went to the door and looked into the hall; a
servant came to her.

"Is Mr. Avery still with Mr. Santoine?" she asked.

"No, Miss Santoine; he has gone