What could this strange thing mean? Who could have appropriated her flowers and kept them from him? Then, with a feeling of shame, not unmixed with indignation, her heart told her that her _father_, in his prejudice against Earle, must have intercepted them. “How cruel!” she murmured. “I do not wonder that you doubted my friendship; but, to exonerate myself, I must tell you that every week I have sent you flowers, or fruit, or _something_, to show you that you were remembered—not once have I failed.” “Then forgive me for all the hard things I have thought,” he said, in tones of self-reproach. “I can never tell you how those sweet little messages cheered me during my first year in—that place, nor how dreary and lonely I was when they came no longer to brighten my gloomy cell. After Mr. Forrester died,” he continued, with emotion, “I felt as if my only friend had been taken from me. I had not one to whom to turn for a ray of comfort.” “I know,” Editha said, with starting tears, then, with rising color, “if you had only dropped me a line, I would have taken care that my offerings reached you safely after that.” “You know the old saying, ‘one may as well be neglected as forgotten;’ I never mistrusted that they had been sent and failed to reach their destination, and so imagined a good many things I had no right to, and——” “And were too proud to remind me of my negligence,” Editha interrupted, with a smile. “Doubtless some enemy has done this, or they could not _all_ have missed coming to me. Am I forgiven for doubting my stanch little friend?” he asked, gently. “Freely; I could not blame you under the circumstances.” “Then let us talk of something else,” Earle said for he began to mistrust from Editha’s manner _who_ had been the guilty one. “Tell me of Mr. Forrester and of yourself during these years.” And thus their conversation drifted to other subjects, and, as they conversed, their old freedom of manner returned in a measure—in a measure, I repeat, for there could not be quite the former carelessness and sparkle, while each was trying to conceal the secret which their hearts held, and which, for the time, at least, they felt they must not reveal. Earle told her of his life in prison—of how he had spent his time—of the knowledge he had acquired, and something of his plans for the future. “Earle,” she said, glancing up at him through the tears she could not restrain, when he had completed his account, “you have borne it so nobly, this suffering for another, that I want to tell you how proud I am of you; and Uncle Richard would say the same thing if he were living.” “Thank you,” he said, with emotion; “it is almost worth having been a prisoner for three years to hear you say that. If only the world might feel as assured of my innocence as you do, and hold out the same friendly hand of welcome,” he concluded, with a sigh. “It will in time, Earle—I feel sure that some day your innocence will be established.”