if I can believe I am making it easy for you."

They walked along, and she said with averted eyes, that he knew had
tears in them, "I promise."

"And I promise, too," he said.

She impulsively put out her left hand toward him, and he held its slim
fingers in his right a moment, and then let it drop. They both honestly
thought they had got the better of that which laughs from its
innumerable disguises at all stratagems and all devices to escape it.

"And now," he said, "I want to talk to you about what brought me over
here to-day. I thought at first that I was only going to see your
lawyer."

XVIII.

Matt felt that he need now no longer practise those reserves in speaking
to Sue of her father, which he had observed so painfully hitherto.
Neither did she shrink from the fact they had to deal with. In the trust
established between them, they spoke of it all openly, and if there was
any difference in them concerning it, the difference was in his greater
forbearance toward the unhappy man. They both spoke of his wrong-doing
as if it were his infirmity; they could not do otherwise; and they both
insensibly assumed his irresponsibility in a measure; they dwelt in the
fiction or the persuasion of a mental obliquity which would account for
otherwise unaccountable things.

"It is what my sister has always said," Sue eagerly assented to his
suggestion of this theory. "I suppose it's what I've always believed,
too, somehow, or I couldn't have lived."

"Yes; yes, it _must_ be so," Matt insisted. "But now the question is how
to reach him, and make some beginning of the end with him. I suppose
it's the suspense and the uncertainty that is breaking your sister
down?"

"Yes--that and what we ought to do about giving up the property.
We--quarrelled about that at first; we couldn't see it alike; but now
I've yielded; we've both yielded; and we don't know what to do."

"We must talk all that over with your lawyer, in connection with
something I've just heard of." He told her of Pinney's scheme, and he
said, "We must see if we can't turn it to account."

They agreed not to talk of her father with Adeline, but she began it
herself. She looked very old and frail, as she sat nervously rocking
herself in a corner of the cottage parlor, and her voice had a sharp,
anxious note. "What I think is, that now we know father is alive, we
oughtn't to do anything about the property without hearing from him. It
stands to reason, don