dead! This--this letter is from the doctor who attended
him."
Tenderly, as he would have helped his own mother, Brian assisted Auntie
Sue to her room. For a little while he sat with her, trying to comfort
her with such poor words as he could find.
Briefly, she told him of the brother who had lived in Argentine for many
years. He had married a South-American woman whom Auntie Sue had never
seen, and while not wealthy had been moderately prosperous. But he
had never forgotten his sister who was so alone in the world. "Several
times, when he could, he sent me money for my savings-bank account," she
finished simply, her sweet old voice low and tender with the memories
of the years that were gone. "John and I were always very fond of each
other. He was a good man, Brian."
Brian Kent sat like a man stricken dumb. Auntie Sue's words, "he sent me
money for my savings-bank account," had made the connection between the
names "Buenos Aires, Argentine; John Wakefield; Susan Wakefield," and
the thing for which his mind had been groping with such a sense of
impending disaster.
In her grief over the death of her brother, and in her memories of their
home years so long past, dear old Auntie Sue had forgotten the peculiar
meaning her words might have for the former clerk of the Empire
Consolidated Savings Bank who sat beside her, and to whom she turned in
her sorrow as a mother to a dearly beloved son.
"But it is all right, Brian, dear," she said with brave cheerfulness.
"When one has watched the sunsets for seventy years, one ceases to fear
the coming of the night, for always there is the morning. Just let me
rest here alone for a little while, and I will be myself again."
She looked up at him with a smile, and Brian Kent, kneeling beside the
bed, bowed his head and caught the dear old hands to his lips. Without
trusting himself to speak again, the man left the room,--closing the
door.
He moved about the apartment as one in a dream. With a vividness that
was torture, he lived again that hour in the bank when, opening the
afternoon mail, he had found the letter from Susan Wakefield with the
Argentine notes, which her letter said she had received from her brother
John in Buenos Aires, and which she was sending to the bank for deposit
to her little account. It had been a very unbusinesslike letter and a
very unbusinesslike way to transmit money. It was, indeed, this nature
of the transaction that had tempted the hard-press
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