The day after the funeral the women had moved to town. Win, however, remained at Menlo Park, to go over such documents of his father’s as had been left there. Shackleton had lived so much at his country place for the last two or three years that many of his papers and letters were kept in the library, which had been his especial sanctum. Among these, the son had come upon a small package of letters, which, fastened together with an elastic, and bearing a note of their contents on one end, had roused his interest. They were the letters exchanged between his father and the chief of the detective bureau when the latter had been commissioned to locate the widow and daughter of Daniel Moreau. Shackleton, a man of exceedingly methodical habits, had kept copies of his letters. There were only seven of them altogether--three from him; four in reply. The first ones were short, only a few lines, containing the request to find the ladies who, the writer understood, were in San Francisco, and ascertain their circumstances and position. Then came the acknowledgment of that, and then in a few days, the answer stating the whereabouts of Mrs. Moreau and her daughter, their means, and such small facts about them as that the mother was in delicate health and the daughter “a handsome, accomplished, and estimable young lady.” Win looked over this correspondence, puzzled and wondering. He remembered the girl he had seen in _The Trumpet_ office that dark afternoon, and how the office boy had told him it was a Miss Moreau, a friend of Mrs. Willers, and a singer. What motive could his father have had in seeking out this girl and her mother in this secret and effectual way? He read over the letters again. Moreau had died in Santa Barbara in the spring, the widow and her daughter had then come to San Francisco, and by the wording of the second letter he inferred that his father had been ignorant of their means, and of the girl’s appearance, style and character. It was evidently not the result of an interest in people he had once known and then lost sight of. It seemed to be an interest, for some outside reason, in two women of whom he knew absolutely nothing. Win had heard that his father contemplated offering a musical education to some singing girl, of whom the young man knew nothing, and had seen only for a moment that day in _The Trumpet_ office. This was undoubtedly the girl. But Shackleton evidently had not heard of her through Mrs. Willers, who was known to be an energetic boomer of obscure genius. He had hunted her out himself; had undoubtedly had some ulterior interest in, or knowledge of her some time before the day Win had seen her. It was odd, the boy thought, meditating over the correspondence. What could have led his father to search for, and then attempt to assist, a woman who seemed to be a complete stranger to him? It looked like the secret paying of an old debt.