"We never heard from Rosamond but once.... Only once, and that was the next day. Just one letter to Anne, which she never showed me. I don't know if even she knew the name of the man.... All she said to me was: 'She's never coming back, Uncle Walter,' and then she covered her poor face with her arm and laid her head against the wall. 'She's not married to him,' she sobbed, 'and she says--oh, God!--she says she doesn't care.....'" "So that was it," thought Peter. "That was Mary Blake's secret. Good God! How shall I tell Morris? A young, pleasure-loving, untaught, unmoral creature.... And he thinks her perfect.... What was his phrase? 'A wonder-woman'!" Old Walter Lord talked on sadly, reminiscently, but for a long time Peter did not hear what he was saying. He was thinking--"What shall I tell Morris? How shall I tell Morris?" CHAPTER XIX IN THE OLD PHOTOGRAPH GALLERY When Peter awoke very early the next morning, though the problem was still the same, the form of his inner question had slightly changed. "How much need I tell Morris?" he asked himself. "If Mary Blake never is found, why dig up the sad old sordid story? It must have happened ten years ago--and perhaps she'd redeemed herself--who can tell? And it's a thankless job, chucking stones is, Pete.... If what O'Malley and I doped out turns out to be true, and Anne, in spite of the virtues old Lord attributes to her.... If Anne, for the sake of her clever sister's money--or from jealousy of her perfect beauty----H'm'm'm." He broke off here to wonder how the sisters came together afterward. Lord evidently knew nothing about it. So far as Peter could learn he was quite unaware that they had ever met again. After recovering from the shock of Lord's disclosure in regard to Rosamond, Peter had, carefully and skilfully, questioned him. The talk lasted far into the night, but all he had found out was this: Upon Rosamond's disappearance from Hobart Falls, Anne had retired, absolutely, within herself. All that winter she lived alone in the small house on the other side of the mountain and never came at all to the village. Lord had gone up to see her many times, and at last she confided to him that she had almost no money at all. He didn't say it in so many words, but Peter gathered that the generous, kind old man had offered to share what little he had with her and had been refused. "When summer came," he told Peter, "without saying anything to me, she went over and got work from the rich city people in Fennimore Park." Peter understood that the old man was very angry when he found it out, but that it had had no effect on Anne's unyielding spirit. She continued to take washing and to do day's work for the summer people. There was nothing else to be done. She was too proud to take money she had not earned, and this seemed to be the only way in which she could make a livelihood.