Miss Hansford was horrified at his coolness and duplicity, while Elithe looked at him with eyes full of pain and surprise. “I saw him; I saw him,” she thought, while her aunt was thinking of the revolver at the bottom of her chest, with “P. R.” upon it. On the piazza, as they were saying good-night, Clarice threw her arms around Elithe’s neck and kissed her, as she said: “I shall never forget what you were to my brother, or your kindness to him. Will you come to the funeral to-morrow morning and sit with us?” “No,—no. Don’t ask me to do that. There is no reason why I should,” Elithe cried, putting up her hands in deprecation. Clarice was making altogether too much of her relations with Jack, and once out upon the avenue she almost ran to get away from the house and its atmosphere. “Oh, auntie,” she said, “it is all so dreadful, and Mr. Ralston does not mean to explain. What shall we do if he is suspected?” “Hold our tongues and trust to the Lord,” was Miss Hansford’s answer, and that night, long after Paul was asleep, she was kneeling in her room and sobbing. “My boy, my boy, will the good Father, who knows how it happened, make him speak out and clear himself?” Elithe, too, was awake and sitting by her window, which faced the woods. On her return from the Percy Cottage she had read Jack’s letter, in which he told her who he was,—what he had been,—why he had taken another name,—and of his love for her,—when it began,—how it had grown,—and how for her sake he had tried to be a man. He told her of his mortification at the slight Clarice put upon him,—of his resolution to attend her wedding, more to see her again than to be a guest where he was not wanted. Of his downfall in Chicago, where he tore up his pledge,—his experience on the boat and what he heard of himself,—his taking the brandy which made him worse,—his determination to leave without seeing any one. This was written in the Beach House, where he spent the night. The encounter with Paul in the morning he described in the P. S., telling how it happened, saying he was sorry,—saying he was a brute, and had sunk so low that now he had no hope, no star to guide him,—nothing to remember of a journey from which he had hoped so much but her face as he saw it in church that morning and the sound of her voice, which he could never forget. Over this letter Elithe’s tears fell so fast that the words were blurred and blotted almost past the possibility of deciphering them. Miss Hansford did not ask what was in the letter, but Elithe read her parts of it calculated to exculpate Jack from intentional wrong doing, and the two sore-hearted women wept together until the clock struck twelve. Then they separated, each going to her own room, where, in an agony of grief and fear, Miss Hansford prayed for her boy, while Elithe sat by the window from which she had talked with Paul, and asked herself again and again: “Could I be mistaken?” The answer was always the same: “I saw him; I saw him.”