Peggy made no effort to check her friend’s wild outburst of weeping. Under the circumstances it would do Ruth good to cry. She looked with a sense of shrinking disgust at the letter on the floor, as if it had been some sort of loathsome creature. "How could he?" she said to herself, as Graham’s frank, handsome face flashed out on the screen of her memory. Only that morning she had seen Graham and his father pass. The older man was listening to something the younger was saying, smiling a little, and the look he bent upon his son was full of trust and confidence. And all the time Graham had been deceiving him, taking the money which meant sacrifices in the home, to buy costly presents for a girl whose name he had never mentioned to his sister. It was no wonder that Ruth cried. Sunny Peggy felt sick and disillusioned. The door-knob rattled. "It’s me!" said a voice, which sounded very much as if the three caramels were simultaneously occupying one small mouth. "Run along, Dorothy!" Peggy was too absorbed in the problem confronting her to make her request tactful. She went over to Ruth, who was making a brave struggle to regain her self-control, and possessing herself of the limp hand, stroked it tenderly. Then Peggy’s instinct to make excuses for everybody, led her to say, "After all, perhaps we’re making a mountain out of a mole-hill." "Mole-hill!" exclaimed Ruth indignantly. "How you can call it a mole-hill for Graham to take his father’s money and pretend it’s for things at college when all the time--" "O, yes, I know. But there’s a chance of a mistake," Peggy protested, "I don’t suppose you’ve talked with Graham about it?" "Goodness, no! I went up to his room this morning to do the work and this letter lay on the floor, not even in the envelope." "That doesn’t look as if he were ashamed of it," Peggy exclaimed triumphantly. "O, that’s Graham all over. No matter what he did, he’d be too careless to cover his tracks. I picked it up and looked at it to see if it was meant to be thrown away or not, and then my eye caught that about the pendant, and I simply couldn’t stop. And after I saw what it meant it seemed to me that I should die if I didn’t tell somebody." "But, Ruth," Peggy protested, alarmed, "you surely are going to talk to Graham about it. You can’t mean to let it go on, and not give him a chance to explain or anything." Poor Ruth hid her face in her hands.