Virginia read truth in their faces.  She turned away.

“Oh, I do not understand!” she said.  “Perhaps I have made a mistake.  I will go.”

She hurried outside to the automobile which was waiting, and drove to the address which Stella had given her.  It was a kind of residential hotel, and a boy in the hall took her up in the lift to the floor on which Stella’s rooms were.  She knocked at the door.  Stella herself opened it.  She started back when she saw who her visitor was.

“You!” she exclaimed.

Virginia stepped into the room.

“Yes!” she answered.  “What have you done with the paper that you stole from the safe?”

Stella closed the door and looked at her cousin thoughtfully.  She had evidently been busy packing.  Dresses and hats lay about on the bed, and in the next room the maid was busy emptying the cupboards.  Stella closed the communicating door.

“Why have you come here?” she said to Virginia.  “You don’t suppose I ran risks 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.”