"That settled the matter, so far as I was concerned. I drove back home again and Jarvis went on to New York. Unfortunately, in the first rage of his discovery of his daughter's flight, he had given the servants some hint of the affair, and it leaked out, but was gradually forgotten. Mary Jarvis, after a long illness, went with her father for a visit to Scotland, and did not return to her home at Scotch Plains for nearly three years. She was greatly changed--older and with an air of sadness which never quite left her. "Her father was changed, too. He had left his daughter at his old home in Scotland and hurried back--why I didn't guess till afterwards. He became more crabbed and irritable than ever; he seemed to be withering away, and his face grew to haunt me, it was so harried and anxious. I suspected that he had become involved in business troubles of some sort, for the country was on the verge of a panic, and once I tried to approach the subject to offer him any help I could, but he stopped me with such ferocity that I never tried again. Then, suddenly, came the news that Endicott had been caught with Fisk in the ruin of Black Friday; but while Fisk saved himself by repudiating his obligations, Endicott had been bound in such a way that he could not repudiate--and the man who had bound him was Hiram Jarvis." The speaker paused and leaned back for a moment in his chair, his face very stern. "That was his revenge," he added. "But I doubt if he foresaw how bitter it was to be. For Endicott shot himself; the place was sold, and the widow and her daughter came to live here in Elizabeth, where they had relatives." "But the boy," I asked; "where was he?" "He was killed two days after that Christmas Eve in a railroad wreck somewhere in the West--I have forgotten exactly where. His body was brought home to Scotch Plains and buried there." "In the West?" I repeated. "What was he doing in the West?" "I don't know," answered Dr. Schuyler. "I've never been able to understand it." "Were he and Miss Jarvis already married? Or did they expect to be married afterwards?" "Well," said Dr. Schuyler slowly, "I inferred from the note that they were already married. But I may have been mistaken in thinking so. I know that her father did not believe it." "And you say that you've never been able to understand why, after all, they did not go away together--why Miss Jarvis went to New York and Endicott to the West?" Dr. Schuyler hesitated. "Of course," he said, after a moment, "the most obvious explanation is that Endicott deserted her; and yet that would have been so unlike him, for he was not a vicious or selfish fellow, Mr. Lester, but generous, honourable, warm-hearted, despite his other faults, which were merely, I think, faults of youth. I've never believed that he deserted her. Perhaps, at the last moment, her courage failed; or perhaps there was a mistake of some sort, a misunderstanding which kept them apart."