"The real matter with which I would ask you to help me is the putting aside, now, of the money which is in my name, and which should be secured against enemies of my poor wife and daughter," said Miles Burlock. "I will never again trust anything to the uncertain time when they may be found, for I believe now they are being kept away from me by this same scoundrel, Andrew Anderson. It may be well for you to know his name." "And where is he?" asked the major, his voice showing the feeling he could not hide, a determination to deal severely with the man who had threatened Dorothy. "That is something I would not dare to tell even if I knew. My only hope of getting these affairs settled so that I may sometime make amends to my dear ones, is by keeping away from Anderson. It might not detain you too long to say that last week my friend, my counselor, and benefactress Marian Douglass, passed away. For years she held safely for me the principal of the money I had been wasting. Now that she is gone, and he knows it, I must at once make it secure in some other way. To-morrow, if you will allow me, I will come again and bring witnesses. No other man in Dalton would be so worthy of the trust. Thousands of dollars have almost made themselves in ways planned and carried out by Marian Douglass, who held this money both for me and from me, but now a part of this must be used to find my wife and my daughter Nellie, and then to run down their persecutors, for I have been a tool, simply, in the hands of those who took what I had and who have been trying for years to get the rest. If nothing happens to me to-night I will come to-morrow morning, after that we may tell the town who it was who tried to spoil the fair name of Dalton." He pressed Dorothy's hand to his lips as he left. She felt a tear fall upon it; and she knew that all her prayers and all her efforts to save this man from his evil ways had not been in vain, and with the happiness that comes always in the knowledge of good accomplished, a new resolve came into her heart--she would some day find Nellie Burlock. CHAPTER VI AT THE SWING The strange story of the reformed man filled Dorothy's brain with exciting thoughts that night, and it was almost morning when she finally fell asleep. Even then she dreamed of all;--the fortune her father was to have in trust, the wicked man who had been trying to get it, and the poor wife and child who were hidden away somewhere, perhaps now starving. In her dreams she became Nellie, and she tried, oh, so hard, to find her own father, the dear major. The worry of it even in sleep gave Dorothy a severe headache, and when she awoke she found her nerves still throbbing and her brow hot and feverish. "Oh, I'll be so glad to go to school to-day," she thought. "I am tired of all this worry, and it will be good to be back with the girls again."