"The honour of men and nations that seems to require arrogance, aggression, violence for its defence, I do not understand. How can the misdeeds of others impair one's true honour? How can punishment for such misdeeds restore it? No; it lies within one, quite intangible save by one's self. "Why should I not know, dear?--I who have lost my own and found it, have held it desperately for a while, then lost it, then regained it, holding it again as I do now--alas!--against no other enemy than I who write this record for your eyes! "Dear, I know of nothing lost which may not be regained, except life. I know of nothing which cannot be rendered tolerable through loyalty. "That material happiness which means so much to some, means now so very little to me, perhaps because I have never lacked it. "Yet I know that, once mistress of myself, nothing else could matter unless your love failed." Again she wrote him toward the end of November: "Why will you not let me help you, dear? My fortune is practically intact so far, except that, of course, I met those obligations which Scott could not meet. Poor Scott! "You know it's rather bewildering to me where millions go to. I don't quite comprehend how they can so utterly vanish in such a short time, even in such a frightful fiasco as the Cascade Development Company. "So many people have been here--Mr. Landon and Mr. Gayfield, Mr. Stainer of Elting & Stainer, that dreadful creature Klawber, a very horrid man named Amos Flack--and dear, grim, pig-headed Mr. Tappan--old Remsen Tappan of all men! "He practically kicked out Mr. Flack and the creature Klawber, who had been trying to frighten Scott and me and even our lawyers. "And think, Duane! He never uttered one sarcasm, one reproach for Scott's foolishness; he sat grim and rusty as the iron that he once dealt in, listening to what Scott had to tell him, never opening that cragged jaw, never unclosing that thin line of cleavage which is his mouth. "We did not know what he had come for; but we know now. He is _so_ good--so good, Duane! And I, who hated him as a child, as a girl--I am almost too ashamed to let him take command and untangle for us, with those knotted, steel-sinewed fingers of his, the wretched, tangled mess that has coiled around Scott and me. "Surely, this man Klawber is a very great villain; and it seems that Mr. Skelton and the wretched Flack creature are little less. As for Jack Dysart, it is all too sorrowful to think about. How must he feel! Surely, surely he could not have known what he was doing. He must have been desperate to go to Delancy Grandcourt. It was wrong; nothing on earth could have propped up the Algonquin, and why did he let his best friend go down with it?