Roy was cordial, but could not forget Inez’s dying words, which had betrayed so much, and every time he looked at Jeff he recalled the scene of the hold up which he had heard described so vividly that he sometimes felt that he had been an actor in it. Fanny was unfeignedly glad to see Jeff and kept him by her a long time while she questioned him of her father’s sickness and death and burial. Helen, who sat near, made no comments, but she did not lose a word, and occasionally, when Fanny cried the hardest, her bit of linen and lace which passed for a handkerchief, went up to her eyes and came away with several wet spots upon it. With his friends around him, treating him as if he had always been an honest man, Jeff began to feel like one. He was glad Alice did not refer to the pickpocket business, for he could not tell her that he had kept his promise to the letter. He had followed no one on the street, or in a crowd, but he could recall pockets in which his hands had been while the owners were pale as death and almost as still. That was buried in the Yosemite and here in Ridgefield, where every one was pleased to see him, the dreadful past was slipping away from him, and with a rebound his old life was returning. Nero, too, came in for a share of notice and petting. Craig, who was fond of dogs, offered to buy him, but Jeff said, “No, he is the only relative I have left in the world. I have brought him from beyond the Rockies and if Mr. Taylor does not object, I shall keep him.” “Object to the critter! Of course not. He was Mark’s, and Dotty isn’t here to care about his feet. They are pretty big. _Shoo, shoo_, doggie; not quite so friendly,” Uncle Zach replied, shaking his fingers at the dog, who had taken a great fancy to him and persisted in laying his head in his lap and occasionally putting his paws on the wheel of his chair. The next day Craig and Alice and Helen went home, but Roy and Fanny staid on to see to the new cottage. The ground for it had been broken a little distance from the old ruin, “but not so far away that ’Tina can’t come across the grass to visit us if she wants to,” Roy said to Fanny, who had no fear of ’Tina so long as Roy was with her. They staid in Ridgefield the rest of the summer with an occasional trip to New York, where Helen kept herself secluded until it was time for the fashionable world to come home and open their doors. Then she gradually made her way again into the society which she enjoyed. Sometime in September Roy and Fanny returned to Boston, leaving the cottage so nearly completed that it would be ready for them in June of the next summer, if they wished to occupy it so early. CHAPTER XIX. ODDS AND ENDS.