to your plans, kept me silent. I deserve your reticence, of course, but I shall be at your wedding. There are certain reasons why I very much wish to visit Oak City, and the same reasons make me wish to be on good terms with you and mother. Can’t we let bygones be bygones, and begin again? Suppose we try. I don’t know when you may expect me, but I am coming. Very truly, JACK.” “If you answer, direct to Denver, as I may be there. If I am not, it will be forwarded to me here.” This was not a bad letter, and if Jack had not said he was coming to her wedding Clarice might have been glad to have heard from him, especially as he promised payment of her money. Her objections to having him in Oak City seemed unreasonable and still were not without some cause. It took so little to affect him, and he was so violent and quarrelsome when upset, and she had been so often mortified that she dreaded a recurrence of what might, and probably would, happen if he came. No matter how stringent the laws might be, he managed to evade them and always had the poison with him. “I have been free from this horror so long that I cannot meet it again,” Clarice thought, as she folded the letter and felt her anger kindling again against Elithe, who had written to Samona of the wedding. She knew this was unjust, but she was irritated and jealous, and smarting from her recent quarrel with Paul, for which Elithe was to blame. “I wish she had never come to Oak City, and, like her aunt, I feel it in my bones that she is my evil star,” she thought. Then she began to wonder why Jack wished particularly to come to Oak City, and why for the same reason he wished to be on good terms with his family. “Elithe can have nothing to do with that. He has never seen her. If he had I might imagine all sorts of complications,” she thought, and was still cogitating on the subject when her mother joined her and the two talked up the matter together, Mrs. Percy evincing more dislike to Jack’s coming than Clarice herself. Between the brother and sister there was some affection; between the stepmother and stepson, none, or at most very little. Mrs. Percy had suffered so much from Jack’s habits that she shrank from putting herself in the way of them again. “He is safe in Montana; let him stay there, and write him such a letter as will keep him there,” she said.