“I know it, but people think you are a widow with a competence sufficient to support us genteelly—they don’t suspect how late we sit up nights, sewing, to make ends meet. Mercy! I hope the peeking old maid didn’t see that,” she exclaimed, as her own eye fell upon the wristband. Then, after a moment, she continued, “I know what I’ll do. I’ll go to Alice this very night, and tell her how sorry we are for what has happened, and I’ll ask her to say nothing about father’s having cheated them and run away. She’s a pretty good sort of a girl, I guess, if I did once to think her so proud.” The plan seemed a feasible one, and that evening as Alice Warren sat bending over a vest, which she must finish that night, she was startled by the abrupt entrance of Adelaide Huntington, who, seizing both her hands, said, with well-feigned distress: “My poor Alice! I never expected to find you thus.” In his arm-chair Mr. Warren was sleeping, but when the stranger’s shadow fell upon him, he awoke, and stretching out his arms, he said: “Who is it, Alice?—who stands between me and the fire?” “It is I,” answered Adelaide, coming to his side, “the daughter of him who ruined you. I have just learned that you were living here in the same village with ourselves, and, at my mother’s request, I have come to tell you how bitterly we have wept over my father’s sin, and to ask you not to hate us for a deed of which we knew nothing until it was all over.” Then seating herself in a chair she continued to speak hurriedly, telling them some truth and some falsehood—telling them how, for a few months they had lived with a distant relative, a wealthy man, who gave them money now for their support—telling them how her father’s disgrace had affected her mother, and begging of them not to speak of it in Oakland, where it was not known. “I don’t know why it is,” she said, “but people have the impression that mother is a widow; and though it is wrong to deceive them, I cannot tell them my father ran away to escape a convict’s cell. It would kill my mother outright, and if you will keep silent, we shall be forever grateful.” There was no reason why Mr. Warren should speak of his former clerk, and he answered Adelaide that neither himself nor Alice had any wish to injure her by talking of the past. Thus relieved of her fears, Adelaide grew very amiable and sympathetic, saying she did not suppose they were so poor, and pitying Alice, who must miss so much her pictures, her flowers, her birds and her music. “Come up and try my piano. You may practice on it any time,” she said, when at last she arose to go. “I never played much. I was not fond of it,” was Alice’s answer, while her father rejoined quickly: “Then you keep a piano. I did not know you had one.” “Oh, yes, father bought it for me at auction, three years ago, and as he was not owing any one then, our furniture was not disturbed.”