to photograph. "Here's luck! What luck it is! Anne Marie to
my uncle! Lord! If he'd lived to read it! If he had read it! Out I'd
have been kicked! One--two--three--_Augenblick_! Out into the street!
Oh, what unbelievable luck! If she'd written to him ten days earlier!
Ten little days!"

His hand shaking, he picked up the letter again, spread it wide, and
began to read it, Peter Grimm standing behind him, looking over the
reader's shoulder.

"Dear Mr. Grimm," the letter ran, "I have not written because I can't
help Willem. And I am ashamed. Don't be too hard upon me, sir, in your
thoughts. At first I often went hungry. And then the few pennies I had
saved for him were spent. Now I see that I can never hope to get him
back. Willem is far better off with you. I know he is. But, oh, how I
wish I could just see him again! _Once._ Perhaps I could come there in
the night time and no one would know----"

"Oh!" breathed Peter Grimm, between tight clenched teeth. "The pity of
it! The _pity_ of it!"

"Who's that?" cried Frederik, looking up with a start of terror from his
perusal of the letter.

The young man peered about the shadows beyond the radius of the lamp, a
nervous dread at his heart.

"Who's in the room!" he demanded, glancing behind him.

[Illustration: "Who's in the room!" he demanded]

Then with a self-contemptuous shake of his head he muttered angrily:

"That's queer. I could have sworn somebody was looking over my shoulder.
Bah! My nerves are going bad!"

He returned to the reading of the letter.

"I met some one from home to-day," went on Anne Marie's epistle. "If
there's any truth in the rumour that Kathrien is going to marry
Frederik, _it mustn't be_, Mr. Grimm. It must _not_. She must not marry
him. For Frederik is my little boy's fa----"

"There _is_ some one here!" muttered Frederik, laying down the letter.

Calming his disordered nerves once more, he glanced furtively up toward
Willem's room in the bedroom gallery above his head. Then he picked up
the photograph and looked at it long with eyes full of trouble and
apprehension. It was the full-length cabinet likeness of a plainly
dressed young woman with a pretty, slack face. And the face's weakness
was half redeemed by a stamp of settled sadness that was not devoid of a
certain dignity.

Frederik turned the photograph over. On the back he read:

"_For my little boy, from Anne Marie._"

His mouth twitched. Throngs of memories were crowding