bly could, because he felt so dreadfully sorry for
her--"'On my return to Chicago, from the trip to England I have so
often told you I intended to make some time soon----'"

"Did he?" asked mother.

"Yes," answered Shelley. "He couldn't talk about much else. It was
his first case. It was for a friend of his who had been robbed of
everything in the world; honour, relatives, home, and money. If Robert
won it, he got all that back for his friend and enough for
himself--that he could--a home of his own, you know! Read on, Laddie!"

"'I was horrified to find on my desk every letter I had written you
during my absence returned to me from the Dead Letter Office, as you
see.'"

"Good gracious!" cried mother, picking up one and clutching it tight as
if she meant to see that it didn't get away again.

"Go on!" cried Shelley.

"'I am enclosing some of them as they came back to me, in proof of my
statement. I drove at once to your boarding place and found you had
not been there for weeks, and your landlady was distinctly crabbed.
Then I went to the college, only to find that you had fallen ill and
gone to your home. That threw me into torments, and all that keeps me
from taking the first train is the thought that perhaps you refused to
accept these letters, for some reason. Shelley, you did not, did you?
There is some mistake somewhere, is there not----'"

"One would be led to think so," said father sternly. "Seems as if he
might have managed some way----"

"Don't you blame him!" cried Shelley. "Can't you see it's all my
fault? He'd been coming regularly, and the other girls envied me; then
he just disappeared, and there was no word or anything, and they
laughed and whispered until I couldn't endure it; so I moved in with
Peter's cousin, as I wrote you; but that left Mrs. Fleet with an empty
room in the middle of the term, and it made her hopping mad. I bet
anything she wouldn't give the postman my new address, to pay me back.
I left it, of course. But if I'd been half a woman, and had the
confidence I should have had in myself and in him---- Oh how I've
suffered, and punished all of you----!"

"Never you mind about that," said mother, stroking Shelley's hair.
"Likely there isn't much in Chicago to give a girl who never had been
away from her family before, 'confidence' in herself or any one else.
As for him--just disappearing like that, without a word or even a
line---- Go on Laddie!"

"'Surely, you kne