se, dear, you will understand that so long
as you were to marry a man who would be likely to make you happy I
was content, but I could not bear to think of your marrying a man I
knew to be altogether unworthy of you."

"You know very well," she said, "that you never intended to let me
marry him. As I said to you last night, I feel very much aggrieved,
Major Mallett. You had said you would be my friend, and yet you let
this go on when you could have stopped it at once. You let me get
talked about with that man, and you would have gone on letting me
get still more talked about before you interfered. That was not
kind or friendly of you."

"But, Bertha," he remonstrated, "the fact that we had not been
friends, and that he had beaten me in a variety of matters, was no
reason in the world why I should interfere, still less why you
should not marry him. When I was stupid enough to tell you that
story, years ago, I stated that I had no grounds for saying that it
was he who played that trick upon my boat, and it would have been
most unfair on my part to have brought that story up again."

"Quite so, but there was the other story."

"What other story?" Frank asked in great surprise.

"The story that George Lechmere came and told me two days ago," she
said, gravely.

"George Lechmere! You don't mean to say--"

"I do mean to say so. He behaved like a real friend, and came to
tell me the story of Martha Bennett.

"He told me," she went on, as he was about to speak, "that you had
made up your mind to tell mamma about it, directly you heard that I
was engaged to Mr. Carthew. That would have been something, but
would hardly have been fair to me. If I had once been engaged to
him, it would have been very hard to break it off, and naturally it
would have been much greater pain to me then than it has been now."

"I felt that. But you see, Bertha, until you did accept him, I had
no right to assume that you would do so. At least so I understood
it, and I did not feel that in my position I was called upon to
interfere until I learned that you were really in danger of what I
considered wrecking your life's happiness."

"I understand that," she said, gently, "and I know that you acted
for the best. But there are other things you have not told me,
Major Mallett--other things that George Lechmere has told me. Did
you think that it would have been of no interest to me to know that
you had forgiven the man who tried to take your life