of a granddaughter.

"If you want the other kind, all you have to do is to forget it. The
crowd I go with aren't good for her.

"Anyway I enclose the card and rates and references of the school. You
see they give the consuls' names.

"If you decide yes, you want your granddaughter to have a chance, write a
letter to the name and address below. That's me. Then write the school,
sending check for one year and say it is for the daughter of the name and
address below. That is the name I am known by here.

"I'm sorry for everything, but of course it's too late now. The truest
thing in the world is this: As you make your bed, so you've got to lie in
it. I made mine wrong, but you couldn't help it. I wouldn't bother you
now except for Rosa's sake.

"Your prodigal son who is eating husks now,

"PAUL."

Mary looked at the photograph--a pretty child with her hair over her
shoulders and a smile in her eyes.

"You poor little thing," she breathed, "and to think you're my niece--and
I'm your aunt ... Aunt Mary," she thoughtfully repeated, and for the
first time she realized that youth is not eternal and that years go
swiftly by.

"Life's the strangest thing," she thought. "It's only a sort of an
accident that I'm not in her place, and she's not in mine.... Perhaps I
sha'n't have any children of my own--ever--" she dreamed, "and if I
don't--it will be nice to think that I did something--for this one--"

For a moment the chill of caution went over her.

"Suppose it isn't really Paul," she thought. "Suppose--it's some sharper.
Perhaps that's why dad never wrote him--"

But an instinct, deeper than anything which the mind can express, told
her that the letter rang true and had no false metal in it.

"Or suppose," she thought, "if he knows dad is dead--suppose he turns up
and makes trouble for everybody--"

Wally's story returned to her memory. "There was an accident out
West--somebody killed. Anyhow he was blamed for it--so he could never
come back or they'd get him--"

"That agrees with his living under this Russian name," nodded Mary.
"Anyhow, I'm sure there's nothing to fear in doing a good action--for a
child like this--"

She propped the picture on her desk and after a great deal of dipping her
pen in the ink, she finally began--

"Dear Sir:

"I have opened your letter to my father, Josiah Spencer. He has been dead
three years. I am his daughter.

"It doesn't seem right that such a nice girl as Rosa shouldn