"No, dear mamma," said Matty, crossing her mother's purpose almost for the first time that she remembered, but wholly sure that she was right in doing so,--"No, dear mamma, it is not best so. Indeed, it is not, mamma! I feel in my bones that it is not!" This she said with a wretched attempt to smile, which was the more ghastly because the tears were running down from both their faces. "You see I have tried, mamma. I knew all day yesterday that something was wrong, and at breakfast this morning I knew it. And I have had to hold up--with the children and all these people--with the feeling that any minute the hair might break and the sword fall. And I know I shall do better if you tell me. You see the boys will be here before dark, and of course they will see, and what in the world shall I say to them?" "What, indeed?" said her poor mother. "Terrible it is, dear child, because your father is so wretched. I have just come from him. He would not let me stay, and yet for the minute I was there, I saw that no one else could come in to goad him. Dear, dear papa, he is so resolute and brave, and yet any minute I was afraid that he would break a blood-vessel and fall dead before me. Oh, Matty, Matty, my darling, it is terrible!" And this time the poor woman could not control herself longer, but gave way to her sobs, and her voice fairly broke, so that she was inarticulate, as she laid her cheek against her daughter's on the sofa. "What is terrible? Dear mamma, you must tell me!" "I think I must tell you, Matty, my darling. I believe if I cannot tell some one, I shall die." Then Mrs. Molyneux told the whole horror to Matty. Here was her husband charged with the grossest plunder of the treasury, and now charged even in the House of Representatives. It had been whispered about before, and had been hinted at in some of the lower newspapers, but now even a committee of Congress had noticed it, and had "given him an opportunity to clear himself." There was no less a sum than forty-seven thousand dollars, in three separate payments, charged to him at the Navy Department as long ago as the second and third years of the Civil War. At the Navy they had his receipts for it. Not that he had been in that department then any more than he was now. He was then chief clerk in the Bureau of Internal Improvement, as he was now Commissioner there. But this was when the second Rio Grande expedition was fitted out; and from Mr. Molyneux's knowledge of Spanish, and his old connection with the Santa Fe trade, this particular matter had been intrusted to him. "Yes, dear mamma!"