false understanding of
reality and found out the truth--by living. It had seemed to her, in
her ignorance, the only way to relieve the suffering of the dying: to
help Larry who was deprived of everything.

Mary-Clare must not desert, as the unmentioned woman had.

But life, living--how they had torn the blindness from her! How she
had paid and paid until that awful awakening after the birth and death
of her last child, three months before! She had tried then to make
Larry understand before he went away, but she could not! Larry always
ascribed her moods, as he called them, to her "just going to have a
child," or "getting over having one."

He had gone away tolerant, but with a warning: "A man isn't going to
stand too much!"

These words had been a challenge. There could be no more compromising.
Pay-day had come for her and Larry.

But the letters!

At this thought Mary-Clare sat up rigidly. A squirrel, that had paused
at her quiet feet, darted affrightedly across the cabin floor.

The letters! The letters in the box hid on the shelf of the closet in
the upper chamber. Always those letters had driven her back from the
light which experience shed upon her to the darkness of ignorance.

Larry had given the letters to her at the time when she questioned,
after the doctor's death, Larry's right to hold her to her marriage
vows. How frightened and full of despair she had been. She had felt
that perhaps Larry had not understood. Why had the doctor never told
her of his desire for her and Larry to marry? Then it was that Larry
had gone away to bring proof. He had never meant to show it to her,
but he must clear himself at the critical moment.

And so he brought the letters. Mary-Clare knew every word of them.
They were burned into her soul: they had been the guides on the hard
road she had travelled. The doctor had always wanted her and Larry to
marry; believed that they would. But she must be left free; no word
must be spoken until she was old enough to choose. To prove his faith
and love in his adopted child, Rivers had, so the letters to Larry
revealed, left his all to her. In case she could not marry Larry, he
confided in her justice to share with him.

The last dark hour had broken the old doctor's self-control--he had
voiced what heretofore he had kept secret. The letters stood as silent
proof of this. And then the old, rigid code asserted its influence. A
promise must be kept!

And so the payment began, but