during the voyage,
and he described them as young people of refinement and education. My
mother, he thought from her speech, was English. They rather held aloof,
he said, and seemed disinclined to mention their own affairs. While he
was ill the news came to us of the finding in a storage warehouse in San
Francisco of an old trunk which it seemed probable had belonged to my
parents. Without going into detail, I may say it was through an old
acquaintance of my adopted father's, who knew the circumstances of my
adoption, that we heard of it. He had some interest in the warehouse,
which was about to be torn down and rebuilt. This trunk was found in
some forgotten corner where it had lain for twenty-five years."

"And did it throw any light?" asked Margaret Elizabeth.

"Not much, it rather deepened the mystery. There was little of
significance in it, but this book and a package of letters. From them I
learned nothing definite, but gathered the unwelcome probability that my
father was under some sort of cloud, and was not using his real name.
This was a matter of inference--of deduction, largely, but it was plain
he had left his home in some sort of trouble.

"It is not easy to piece together scattered allusions, when you have no
clue. The letters were most of them written by my father to my mother,
just before and soon after their marriage, with one or two from her to
him. One of these, which I found between the leaves of this little book,
I want you to read. It concludes my story, and to my mind lightens it a
little."

The letter the Candy Man held out to Margaret Elizabeth was written on
thin paper, in a delicate angular hand.

"Ought I to read it?" she demurred. "Are you sure she would like it?"

"Somehow I am very sure," he answered. "And I feel that it will be a
grip on our friendship. I have told you the worst, I wish you to know
the best of me."

She acquiesced, and, an elbow on her knee, shading her eyes with her
hand, she read the letter, whose date was thirty years ago. Far back
in the past this seemed to Margaret Elizabeth, yet it was a girl like
herself who wrote.

The first sentences were almost meaningless, so strong was the feeling
that she had no right to be reading it at all, but as she went on she
forgot her scruples. It was evidently a reply to a letter from her lover
in which he had spoken of the cloud that hung over his name, and it was
a confession of her faith in him, girlish, sweet and tender