“But we never found him,” she repeated. “So after a while we left the city, my uncle and I, and went to the little farm he had in Maryland. He was something of a writer too, like my father; and he published a little weekly paper. So you see it was an interesting home he had brought me to. His wife was one of those women who are well pleased to have a motherless child to add to her own. She was kind to me but she didn’t spoil me because I was bounden to her. She set me my tasks and saw to it that I did them, and when I was a grown girl and showed a little talent for writing I was sent to my uncle’s office to help with the making of his paper and setting of it up. He drilled me in writing and he taught me type-setting, and I was content there. I never wanted to take up any life of my own. I wanted to be left to myself to mourn for David—” “Oh, but there was nothing in that,” broke in Azalea. “Don’t I know it? But sorrow is like sickness and it can cloud the spirits as sickness weakens the body. But for being kept so busy by my wise relatives, I should have lost my mind altogether, I make no doubt. But they were a large family, and there was teasing and laughing and tricks going on as well as work, and that was my medicine. But even with all that, I was forever looking down the road, thinking one of those New York detectives would be bringing my little brother back to me. Whenever the letters came I sat frozen with hope that wouldn’t be hope, till they were given out. I kept thinking that one would be handed to me that would tell me David was found. But none ever was.” “But you grew happier after a time,” protested Azalea, who could not long endure the thought of sorrow. “You must have! See how happy everything is with you now.” “Yes,” admitted Mary Cecily, “I did grow happier after a time, though as I say, I didn’t really want to. But I got to be a young woman, and Bryan Rowantree came along. He was the younger son of a fine English family—Irish on his mother’s side, however—and he came over to America to better himself. He heard of my uncle’s little paper and looked him up, thinking he might be wanted to lend a hand, but my uncle liked to run things his own way, quietly and casually, as he used to put it. So he didn’t take the young man into partnership—but I did.” She smiled down at Azalea happily, and the girl could see that whatever others might think, Rowantree’s wife could see nothing but the advantages of the marriage. “I say he was young,” she went on. “He was, however, twelve years older than myself. But I have always been a poor thing and thankful to have some one to lean on.” “Mercy me,” thought Azalea, “can it be she thinks she’s leaning on that man? I thought it was just the other way.” She kept her eyes fixed on the ground carefully, afraid that if she lifted them her thoughts would be read in her face.