the stars fill the sky while thoughts shone, vanished, and
shone again in soft confusion like the fireflies in the grove. Only one
continued--that now she might choose her future. Her father had said so
with an icy venom which flashed fire as he added, "But if you quit
Rosemont now, so help me God, you shall never own it, if I have to put
it to the torch on my dying bed!"

She heard something and stepped into hiding. What rider could be coming
at this hour? John March? Henry Fair? It was neither. As he passed in at
the gate she shrank, gasped, and presently followed. Warily she rose up
the front steps, stole to the parlor blinds, and, peering in, saw her
father pay five crisp thousand dollar bills to Cornelius Leggett.

In her bed Barbara thought out the truth: that Cornelius still held some
secret of her father's; that in smaller degree he had been drawing hush
money for years; and that he had concluded that any more he could hope
to plunder from the blazing ruin of his living treasury must be got
quickly, and in one levy, ere it fell. But what that secret might be she
strove in vain to divine. One lurking memory, that would neither show
its shape nor withdraw its shadow, haunted her ringing brain. The clock
struck twelve; then one; then two; and then she slept.

And then, naturally and easily, without a jar between true cause and
effect, the romantic happened! The memory took form in a dream and the
dream became a key to revelation. When Johanna brought her mistress's
coffee she found her sitting up in bed. On her white lap lay the old
reticule of fawn-skin. She had broken the clasp of its inner pocket and
held in her hand a rudely scrawled paper whose blue ink and strutting
signature the unlettered maid knew at a glance was from her old-time
persecutor, Cornelius. It was the letter her father had dropped under
the chair when she was a child. Across its face were still the bold
figures of his own pencil, and from its blue lines stared out the
_secret_.

Garnet breakfasted alone and rode off to town. The moment he was fairly
gone Johanna was in the saddle, charged by her mistress with the
delivery of a letter which she was "on no account to show or mention to
anyone but----"

"Yass'm," meekly said Johanna, and rode straight to the office of John
March.

A kind greeting met her as she entered, but it was from Henry Fair, and
he was alone. He, too, had been reading a letter, a long one in a lady's
writing, and see