"Constance," he began, sternly, "my wife tells me that valuable papers which I entrusted to her keeping have disappeared. She tells me further that she had dropped them--carelessly, as I have told her--into the hammock in which your little sister slept and that you saw them there, commenting upon it; that you soon called Giles to set right some slight matter in the hammock; and that shortly after you and he had left her, she discovered her loss. What do you know of this? Tell me all that you know, and tell me the truth." Constance's fear left her at this word. Throwing up her head she looked her father in the eyes, nearly on a level with her own as she stood upon a sandy hummock. "It needs not telling me to speak the truth, Father. I am your daughter and my mother's daughter; it runs not in my blood to lie," she said. Stephen Hopkins touched her arm lightly, a look of relief upon his face. "Thank you for that reminder, my girl," he said. "It is true, and Giles is of the same strain. Know you aught of this misfortune?" "Nothing, Father," said Constance. "And because I know nothing whatever about it, in answering you I have told you all that I have to tell." "And Giles----" began her father, but stopped. "Nor Giles," Constance repeated, amending his beginning. "Giles is headstrong, Father, and I fear for him often, but you know that he is honourable, truth-telling. Would your son _steal_ from you?" "But your stepmother says no one entered the cabin after you had left it before she discovered her loss," insisted Stephen Hopkins. "What am I to think? What do you think, Constance?" "I think that there is an explanation we do not know. I think that my stepmother hates Giles and me, especially him, as he has the first claim to the inheritance that she would have for her own children. I think that she has seized this opportunity to poison you against us," said Constance, with spirited daring. "Oh, Father, dear, dear Father, do not let her do this thing!" "Nay, child, you are unjust," said her father, gently. "I confess to Mistress Eliza's jealousy of you, and that there is not great love for you in her. But, Constance, do you love her, you or Giles? And that she is not so base as you suspect is shown by the fact that she has delayed until to-day to tell me of this loss, dreading, as she hath told me, to put you wrong in my eyes. Fie for shame, Constance, to suspect her of such outrageous wickedness, she who is, after all, a good woman, as she sees goodness." "Father, if the packet were lost through her carelessness, would you not blame her? Is it not likely that she would shield herself at our cost, even if she would not be glad to lower us, as I am sure she would be?" persisted Constance.