. Would she meet Mr. Taggett's specific
charges with the like fortitude? Mr. Slocum himself had been
prostrated by them; he prayed to Heaven that Margaret might have more
strength than he, as indeed she had.

"The man has got together a lot of circumstantial evidence,"
continued Mr. Slocum cautiously; "some of it amounts to nothing,
being mere conjecture; but some of it will look badly for Richard, to
outsiders."

"Of course it is all a mistake," said Margaret, in nearly her
natural voice. "It ought to be easy to convince Mr. Taggett of that."

"I have not been able to convince him."

"But you will. What has possessed him to fall into such a
ridiculous error?"

"Mr. Taggett has written out everything at length in this
memorandum-book, and you must read it for yourself. There are
expressions and statements in these pages, Margaret, that will
necessarily shock you very much; but you should remember, as I tried
to while reading them, that Mr. Taggett has a heart of steel; without
it he would be unable to do his distressing work. The cold
impartiality with which he sifts and heaps up circumstances involving
the doom of a fellow-creature appears almost inhuman; but it is his
business. No, don't look at it here!" said Mr. Slocum, recoiling; he
had given the book to Margaret. "Take it into the other room, and
read it carefully by yourself. When you have finished, come back and
tell me what you think."

"But, papa, surely you"--

"I don't believe anything, Margaret! I don't know the true from
the false any more! I want you to help me out of my confusion, and
you cannot do it until you have read that book."

Margaret made no response, but passed into the parlor and closed
the folding-doors behind her.

After an absence of half an hour she reentered the breakfast room,
and laid Mr. Taggett's diary on the table beside her father, who had
not moved from his place during the interval. Margaret's manner was
collected, but it was evident, by the dark circles under her eyes,
and the set, colorless lips, that that half hour had been a cruel
thirty minutes to her. In Margaret's self-possession Mr. Slocum
recognized, not for the first time, the cropping out of an ancestral
trait which had somehow managed to avoid him in its wayward descent.

"Well?" he questioned, looking earnestly at Margaret, and catching
a kind of comfort from her confident bearing.

"It is Mr. Taggett's trade to find somebody guilty," said
Margaret, "a