As they stood thus hand in hand, Watts, knowing that every word was heard, essayed his mischievous worst. "Dear Know-not-thine-own-heart," he called, "Lady of Denial"--"Heart's Sorrow." Her head, shining with its coils of brown hair, appeared at the little oriel opening. Eleanor Ledyard smiled down her reproof. "Watts, how am I to keep at this thing which you know I must do if you two don't go away and amuse yourselves quietly; have I two children instead of one?" "I wish you had----" murmured the man. He let something come into his eyes that Eleanor had often seen there; the deep blue eyes with the black lashes tried to meet this with womanly severity. Somehow this morning the look failed. Watts Shipman had come far to see a fair woman, and a spark of the tradition of the cavaliers and men of romance was in his blood. A lady at an oriel window was a person who must ultimately do one thing. Come down! The lawyer, his head bared, looked belligerently back, and something in his gaze had made Eleanor turn from the window quickly. "I guess my mother is coming down," said little Pudge. "She'd better," said Watts grimly, "or I'd have had to go and get her." "But you couldn't," said Pudge earnestly, "not if she didn't want you to." Watts turned and looked at the small, earnest face. "Dear lamb, I know that," groaned the man. "I know that; don't rub it in." He called up to the empty window. "I say, Eleanor, please bring that letter stuff down and read it here; if you've got to do the deadly thing, let me help!" So the morning ended by her coming down, and they sat very contentedly with Pudge making paper dolls out of the envelopes his mother gave him. Eleanor, with a sort of desperate haste, tore packet after packet of letters. All those relating to her husband's early life she had said she would set aside, "something for Pudge to have." Others she tore up so vehemently, into such small pieces, that the lawyer, a mere man, wondered, and little Pudge, carrying baskets of fragments to the trash-box, thought how much Hop-o'-My-Thumb would have liked these paper fragments for his trail back to his mother. That the fragments were in reality part of the trail of a weak man, father to her sturdy little boy, made a drift like falling snow in Eleanor's heart. One letter she had saved to show to Watts, and as the lawyer read it his eyebrows went up. When at last Shipman put down the closely written sheets he bent his deep gaze on her. "Well, that does look as if----" he turned questioningly. "You surely don't believe Ledyard is alive," incredulously, "Martin Ledyard, the great scientific adventurer, alive and the world not know it!"