st hours, when his mind was wandering. Then he spoke of and asked
for her continually, driving poor Hephzibah to distraction, for her love
for her lost sister was as great as his.

The letter was the complaining whine of a thoroughly selfish man. I can
scarcely refer to it without losing patience, even now when I understand
more completely the circumstances under which it was written. It was not
too plainly written or coherent and seemed to imply that other letters
had preceded it. Morley begged for money. He was in "pitiful straits,"
he declared, compelled to live as no gentleman of birth and breeding
should live. As a matter of fact, the remnant of his resources, the
little cash left from the Captain's fortune which he had taken with him
had gone and he was earning a precarious living by playing the violin in
a second-rate orchestra. "For poor dead Ardelia's sake," he wrote, "and
for the sake of little Francis, your grandchild, I ask you to extend
the financial help which I, as your heir-in-law, might demand. You may
consider that I have wronged you, but, as you should know and must know,
the wrong was unintentional and due solely to the sudden collapse of
the worthless American investments which the scoundrelly Yankee brokers
inveigled me into making."

If the money was sent at once, he added, it might reach him in time to
prevent his yielding to despondency and committing suicide.

"Suicide! HE commit suicide!" sniffed Hephzy when she read me the
letter. "He thinks too much of his miserable self ever to hurt it. But,
oh dear! I wish Pa had told me of this letter instead of hidin' it away.
I might have sent somethin', not to him, but to poor, motherless Little
Frank."

She had tried; that is, she had written to the French address, but
her letter had been returned. Morley and the child of whom this letter
furnished the only information were no longer in that locality. Hephzy
had talked of "Little Frank" and dreamed about him at intervals ever
since. He had come to be a reality to her, and she even cut a child's
picture from a magazine and fastened it to the wall of her room beneath
the engraving of Westminster Abbey, because there was something about
the child in the picture which reminded her of "Little Frank" as he
looked in her dreams.

She and I had lived together ever since, I continuing to turn out, each
with less enthusiasm and more labor, my stories of persons and places of
which, as Campbell said but too