long conference. Later Harold Stevens went to New York, and being
identified his baggage was delivered to him, and no one on the beach
ever knew that Jake Canfield had been the saver of the life of the
passenger reported as drowned. Six months passed, and Jake married and
entered into the misery of his second-hand family, and as he stated in
his letter in confirmation of old Berwick, his misery began at once. He
learned that he had married an evil woman with an evil lot of children.
Jake, however, was not a man to complain, and one day after the
expiration of two years following the loss of the bark he received a
summons to New York, and there met the man whose life he had saved.

CHAPTER X.

CONCLUSION.

The narrative in the letter went on to recite that the man Harold
Stevens had taken a cold, owing to his experience when washed overboard,
and the fatal disease consumption had ensued. He sent for Jake Canfield
as a man whom he believed to be honest and faithful, and to him he
confided his only child, stating that the mother had died in South
America and the child had been in the hands of friends whom he feared.
He stated that he had secured possession of his child, and desired to
consign her to Jake. He gave many directions concerning the child, but
enjoined that she should not know she was an heiress until she was
twenty-five years of age. The letter did not state why this
determination had been reached by the father. Jack took possession of
the child and the fortune, and for reasons never explained the father
desired that her real name and identity and parentage should be
concealed until her twenty-fifth birthday. Jake took charge of the child
and the fortune, and two weeks later the father died, and strange to
say, about the same time Jake's son died, and when he took the little
child to his home he represented her as the daughter of his son, hoping
thereby to conceal her real parentage more effectively. Then came the
time when he took the child and placed her in charge of perfect
strangers, giving reasons that do not concern the interests of our
story, but based on the idea of his second-hand family and their evil
feeling toward his supposed granddaughter. In the meantime Jake had been
worried about the fortune deposited with him. He was an old man, led a
perilous life going to sea, and he finally determined to deposit the
money with some one whom he knew would be honest. He had gone to school
with Mr