Hal's mother died, as desperately in love as she had been when she
ran away with him, and that he was almost crushed by her loss and never
wholly got over it. He transferred his devotion to the child, who was
only three years old when the mother died. When Hal was a mere child my
mother saw him once taking in dollars at a country fair booth,--just
think of it, dearest,--and she said he was the picture of his
girl-mother then. Later, when Professor Certain, as he called himself
then, got rich, he gave Hal the best of education. But he never let him
have anything to do with the Ellersleys--that was Mrs. Surtaine's name.
All the family are dead now."

"Well, there must be some good in the old boy," admitted Willard. "But I
don't happen to like him. I do like the boy. Blood does tell, Jinny. But
if he's really as much of an Ellersley as he looks, there's a bitter
enlightenment before him when he comes to see Dr. Surtaine as he really
is."

Meantime Hal, home at a reasonable hour, in the interest of his new
profession, had taken with him the pleasantest impressions of the
Willards' hospitality. He slept soundly and awoke in buoyant spirits for
the dawning enterprise. On the breakfast table he found, in front of his
plate, a bunchy envelope addressed in a small, strong, unfamiliar hand.
Within was no written word; only a spray of the trailing arbutus, still
unwithered of its fairy-pink, still eloquent, in its wayward, woodland
fragrance, of her who had worn it the night before.

CHAPTER IX

GLIMMERINGS

Ignorance within one's self is a mist which, upon closer approach,
proves a mountain. To the new editor of the "Clarion" the things he did
not know about this enterprise of which he had suddenly become the
master loomed to the skies. Together with the rest of the outer world,
he had comfortably and vaguely regarded a newspaper as a sort of
automatic mill which, by virtue of having a certain amount of grain in
the shape of information dumped into it, worked upon this with an
esoteric type-mechanism, and, in due and exact time, delivered a
definite grist of news. Of the refined and articulated processes of
acquisition, selection, and elimination which went to the turning-out of
the final product, he was wholly unwitting. He could as well have
manipulated a linotype machine as have given out a quiet Sunday's
assignment list: as readily have built a multiple press as made up an
edition.

So much he admitted to McGu