further details--the countless trifles with which for half a dozen years the gossips of Montgomery regaled themselves--are not for this writing. Many years had passed--or, to be explicit, exactly sixteen. One of the first results of the incident had been the immediate elimination of the Holton half of the firm name by which the bank had long been known. Jack's brother William organized the First National Bank, toward which Mr. Amzi Montgomery's spectacles pointed several times daily, as already noted. Samuel, the oldest son of the first Holton, tried a variety of occupations before he was elected Secretary of State. He never fully severed his ties with Montgomery, retaining a house in town and the farm on Sugar Creek. After retiring from office, he became a venturesome speculator, capitalizing his wide political acquaintance in the sale of shares in all manner of mining and plantation companies, and dying suddenly, had left his estate in a sad clutter. In due course of time it became known that Lois Kirkwood had divorced her husband at long range, from a Western state where such matters were at the time transacted expeditiously, and a formal announcement of her marriage to Holton subsequently appeared in the Montgomery "Evening Star." The day after his wife's departure Kirkwood left his home and did not enter it again. It was said by romanticists among the local gossips that he had touched nothing, leaving it exactly as it had been, and that he always carried the key in his pocket as a reminder of his sorrow. Phil was passed back and forth among her aunts, _seriatim_, until she went to live with her father, in a rented house far from the original roof-tree. Even in practicing the most rigid economy of space some reference must be made to the attitude of Lois Kirkwood's sisters toward her as a sinning woman. Their amazement had yielded at once to righteous indignation. It was enough that she had sinned against Heaven; but that she should have brought shame upon them all and placed half the continent between herself and the scene and consequences of her iniquity, leaving her family to shoulder all its responsibilities, was too monstrous for expression. They were Montgomerys _of_ Montgomery; it seemed incredible that the town itself could ever recover from the shock of her egregious transgression. They vied with each other in manifestations of sympathy for Kirkwood, whose nobility under suffering was so admirable; and they lavished upon Phil (it had been _like_ Lois, they discovered, to label her with the preposterous name of Phyllis!) an affection which became in time a trial to the child's soul.