"I think I recognize that handwriting, Lorna," Ralph said. "It is that of a girl named Cora Devine. I do not know why she should write to you unless you opened the correspondence. Is it so?" he added gravely. "Ye-es," admitted Lorna. "I do not just know what your desire was in writing to Miss Devine. If it was to learn what my interest in her is, I will tell you that. She was a Cambridge girl—a mill girl. Silly and showy. You know the kind. She got into trouble with—with one of the college fellows, and lost her job. Then her father was harsh to her. You know how many of that sort of people are, I suppose. They are strict with their children when it is too late." "And who was the man, Ralph?" Lorna whispered. "Well—I’m not much for telling tales out of school. But now that he has gone so far and is in jail, I may as well tell you that it was Degger." "Oh! And he told me you were mixed up with Cora Devine, Ralph." "I was." And Ralph smiled briefly. "He treated her like a dog. I had a chance to help her. I merely lent her money. She worked and paid me back—every cent. Then I managed to make her father reverse his decision, and Cora went back to live at home. They moved to Charlestown to escape gossip. "Now, just lately, the old man has been ailing and they discovered that to save his life he must be operated on. Cora wrote to me and asked me for money to help. She says she will pay it back. I believe she will—— "Why, Lorna! you are tearing that letter up without reading it." "I don’t need to read it." "But you would see by what she writes that I tell you the truth," he urged. She allowed the bits of paper to flutter away across the sands. She turned her piquant face toward him so that he might see her smile and the light in her eyes. "I need nobody to guarantee your word, Ralph Endicott," she said softly. "I know you are one man without guile." The old-fashioned fall flowers in Miss Heppy’s garden (those which the high sea had not torn away) made brilliant patches of color upon the bleached sand before the lighthouse. Tobias o’ the Light sat on the bench beside the door nursing a well-colored pipe. Out of the open kitchen door floated a delicious odor of frying doughnuts. Miss Heppy, frying fork in hand and with glowing countenance, presided over the kettle while the heap of brown rings and twists grew higher in the bowl on the stove shelf. "Heppy," her brother said reflectively, removing the pipe from between his lips to look at it, "I cal’late I will buy me that silver-banded pipe Si Compton’s got in his store case, after all." He said it tentatively, and then cocked his ear for her reply. "Tobias Bassett! air you a plumb fool?" "Not so’s you’d notice it I ain’t, Heppy," he rejoined, grinning. "I think you be. You don’t need a silver-banded pipe no more than our old cat needs two tails." "Oh, sugar! I dunno. A cat with two tails would be something dif’rent, I do allow."