at was
not our little friend--or if it was, she was in that car by some curious
chance, not because she belonged there."

"So you're going on trusting her?" was King's abstract of these
reflections. He scanned her closely.

She nodded. "Until I have stronger proof to the contrary than your
looking into a pair of beautiful eyes. Have you never observed, my
friend, how many pairs of beautiful eyes there are in the world?"

He shook his head. "I haven't bothered much about them, except now and
then for a bit of nonsense making."

"But this pair you, too, are going to go on trusting?"

"I am. If that girl was Miss Linton she had a reason for not speaking.
If it wasn't"--he drew a deep breath--"well, I don't know exactly how to
explain that!"

"I do," said Ellen Burns, smiling. "She thought she would never see you
again, and she yielded to a girlish desire to look hard at--a real man."

It was this speech which, in spite of himself, lingered in King's mind
after she was gone, for the balm there was in it--a balm she had
perfectly understood and meant to put there. Well she guessed what his
disablement meant to him--in spite of the hope of complete recovery--how
little he seemed to himself like the man he was before.

Certainly it was nothing short of real manhood which prompted the talk
he had with his mother one day not long after this. She brought him a
letter, and she was scrutinizing it closely as she came toward him. He
was fathoms deep in his work and did not observe her until she spoke.

"Whom can you possibly have as a correspondent in this town, my son?"
she inquired, her eyes upon the postmark, which was that of a small city
a hundred miles away. It was one in which lived an old school friend of
whom she had never spoken, to her recollection, in King's hearing, for
the reason that the family had since suffered deep disgrace in the eyes
of the world, and she had been inexpressibly shocked thereby.

King looked up. He was always hoping for a word from Anne Linton, and
now, suddenly, it had come, just a week after the encounter with the
girl in the car--which had been going, as it happened, in the opposite
direction from the city of the postmark. He recognized instantly the
handwriting upon the plain, white business envelope--an interesting
handwriting, clear and black, without a single feminine flourish. He
took the letter in his hand and studied it.

"It is from Miss Linton," he said, "and I am very glad