"No. Mr. Cragg said that too, and I looked through all the packets carefully—not reading, but just seeing the names and dates. There was no money anywhere, and there were no papers for me. None at all. All of them were letters to my father, and most were quite old—written a great many years ago. They were not meant for me to see. And you— you would have read them!" Pattie said this in a tone of unbelieving amazement. "You would have read them! You couldn't, surely, have meant to do that!" A faint sense of shame kept Mrs. Cragg silent. Pattie came a step nearer. "If Dot had seen—only think, if little Dot had seen!" she said. "Dot—who ought only to know you as true! Think—if she had known!" "A baby like her! As if it mattered!" "But it does matter—very much. Promise me that Dot shall never hear about this." Mrs. Cragg broke into a laugh. "And you are not sorry! You do not mind! Not in the very least." There was a short silence. Mrs. Cragg had some ado to keep up her hardness before that grieved face. "It's all your fault," she said at length. "You've been past everything with your fancies, not telling anything I'd a right to know, and pretending you couldn't read the letters. As if everybody didn't read other people's letters when they're dead! And so of course I thought I'd see for myself. There was no reason why I shouldn't. Mr. Cragg and I are giving you a home, and we have a right to know about you." "Not to find it out in that way," said Pattie gravely. "And it was no pretending. I have thought it wrong to read the letters. Other people thinking differently did not make it right for me. I could not do what I felt to be wrong." CHAPTER XII Those Three Letters Pattie pointed to the keys hanging from the japanned tin box. "Those are yours—not mine," she said. "I can't get them out. The key has stuck." "When did you find that you could unlock my box?" Pattie's quietness had a mastery over Mrs. Cragg, subduing her vehemence, and this question received an answer. "I found the other day that I'd got a key to fit." "What day?" "When the boxes first came. I found it out directly." "And you read—did you read anything?" "Not then—not that day, I mean." Mrs. Cragg wondered at herself for tamely answering these queries, yet she went on doing so. "But another day you did?" "One or two letters." "That was what you meant just now, when you said you had found what you wanted to know." Pattie had to sit down, for her limbs gave way under her. "And to-day—you meant to read more letters." "No, I didn't. I meant just to put them back—the ones I had taken. I didn't want to keep them." "Where are they?" Mrs. Cragg brought the three sheets out of her pocket, and gave them to Pattie. The girl had grown white. "You have read these?" "Yes; I didn't see why I shouldn't,"—with another attempt to brazen it out. "I don't see why I shouldn't,—if you wouldn't tell me anything. It was your own fault—being so obstinate."