ss of the cruelty to which he had been subjected.

"It is this way," he said; "Viola, I think, feels that she does not know
me sufficiently well. After all, we have seen but little of each other,
and if she accepted me, it was on the spur of the moment. Since then she
has thought of it more seriously. It is for me to win her, not for her
to throw herself in my arms. That is what she has thought. She may seem
capricious; and what if she does? Your knowledge of women has, I am
sure, made you indulgent."

"Not in the least," Mr. Van Norden answered. And then, for the time
being, the subject was dropped.

It was this semi-consolatory view which Tristrem took of the matter
after the effect of the first shock had lost its force. But when he
received the bundle of letters, together with the Panama hat, which,
through some splendid irony, had been devised to him in the only clause
of the will in which his name was mentioned, it was as though a flash
had rent the darkness and revealed in one quick glare an answer to the
enigma in which he groped.

The letters were few in number--a dozen at most--and they were tied
together with a bit of faded ribbon. They were all in the same hand, one
and all contained protestations of passionate love, and each was signed
in full, Roanoke Raritan. The envelope which held them was addressed to
Mrs. Erastus Varick.

It was then that he saw the reason of his disinheritance, and it was
then that he understood the cause of Viola's withdrawal. It was evident
to him that Mrs. Raritan possessed either thorough knowledge of the
facts, or else that she had some inkling of them which her feminine
instinct had supplemented into evidence, and which had compelled her to
forbid the banns. There were, however, certain things which he could not
make clear to his mind. Why had Mrs. Raritan treated him with such
consideration? She had known from the first that he loved her daughter.
And after the engagement, if she wished it broken, why had she allowed
Viola to invite him to the Pier?

These things were at first inexplicable to him. Afterward he fancied
that it might be that Mrs. Raritan, originally uninformed, had become so
only through the man whom he had believed was his father, after the
announcement of the engagement had been made to him, and possibly
through some communication which had only reached her after his sudden
death. This explanation he was inclined to accept, and he was
particularly inclin