No one but the two families knew of Carter’s repeated attempts to be reconciled to Starr; of his feeble endeavor at explanation; of her continued refusal even to see him; and the decided letter she wrote him after he had written her the most abject apology he knew how to frame; nor of her father’s interview with the young man wherein he was told some facts about himself more plainly than anyone, even in his babyhood, had ever dared to tell him. Mr. Endicott agreed to keep silence for Starr’s sake, provided the young man would do nothing to create any gossip about the matter, until the intended wedding had been forgotten, and other events should have taken the minds of society, from their particular case. Carter, for his own sake, had not cared to have the story get abroad and had sullenly acceded to the command. He had not, however, thought it necessary to make himself entirely miserable while abroad; and there were those who more than once spoke his name in company with that of a young and dashing divorcée. Some even thought he returned to America sooner than he intended in order to travel on the same steamer that she was to take. However, those whispers had not as yet crossed the water; and even if they had, such things were too common to cause much comment. Then, one Monday morning, the papers were filled with horror over an unusually terrible automobile accident; in which a party of seven, of whom the young divorcée was one and Stuyvesant Carter was another, went over an embankment sixty feet in height, the car landing upside down on the rocks below, and killing every member of the party. The paper also stated that Mr. Theodore Brooks, intimate friend of Carter’s, who was to have been best man at the wedding some months previous, which was postponed on account of the sudden illness and death of the bride’s mother, was of the party. Thus ended the career of Stuyvesant Carter, and thus the world never knew exactly why Starr Endicott did not become Mrs. Carter. Michael, from the moment that he went forth from delivering his message in the church, saw no more of the Endicotts. He longed inexpressibly to call and enquire for Starr; to get some word of reconciliation from her father; to ask if there was not some little thing that he might be trusted to do for them; but he knew that his place was not there, and his company was not desired. Neither would he write, for even a note from him could but seem, to Starr, a reminder of the terrible things of which he had been witness, that is if anybody had ever told her it was he that brought her home.