isks like that, to possess myself of a thing which I meant to give up.
Oh! you need not look as though you were going to spring at me. I have
not got it here, I can assure you. I parted with it hours ago!"

"To whom?" Virginia demanded.

"My father will find out some day, perhaps," Stella answered. "I don't
see that it's so much his affair. The men who have to pay for their
folly are the men who deserve to pay. I see that my father was too
cunning to write his name down with theirs."

"You mean," Virginia demanded, "that you have not given it to Mr.
Littleson and his friends?"

"Not I!" Stella laughed,--"although they offered me one hundred
thousand dollars for it."

Virginia sat down on the bed. She had not slept all night, and she had
eaten no breakfast.

"Stella," she said, looking at her cousin with her big eyes full of
tears, and her voice becoming unsteady, "you have done a very, very
cruel thing. You have ruined my life. Your father had done so much for
my people, and now he is going to stop it all and send me back to them.
You can't imagine what it means to be thrown back into such poverty. It
isn't for myself I mind; it is for their sakes."

"I don't see," Stella answered, "how my father can blame you."

Virginia shook her head sadly.

"Your father is one of those men," she said, "who judges only by
results. He trusted me, and whether it was my fault or my misfortune, I
was a failure. Stella, does it mean so much to you, after all, that you
should keep that paper? Why don't you bring it back and be reconciled to
your father? I should be quite content to go away; anything so long as
he gets it back. Don't you understand that after he has been so kind, I
hate the feeling that I have been so abject a failure?"

Stella smiled a little bitterly.

"It is my turn," she said, "to tell you that you do not understand my
father. He would never forgive me, nor do I want him to. If you think
that I was the tool of these men Littleson and Weiss, you make a
mistake. What I did, I did for the sake of the only man I have ever
cared for. Never mind his name, never mind who he is. But if it makes my
father any happier, you can tell him that his friends are no nearer
safety now than they were when the paper was in his keeping."

Virginia looked around the room drearily.

"You are going away?" she said.

"I am going to Europe," Stella answered. "I hate America. I hate the
whole atmosphere here. It is a vile, unnatu