“Perhaps I ought to show it to him,” she uneasily thought.  “If a thing like this is being whispered around, I think he ought to get to the bottom of it, and stop it....  I know I don’t like him for some things,” she continued, more undecided than ever, “but that’s all the more reason why I should be fair to him—­in things like this, for instance.”

She compromised by tucking the letter in her pocket, and when Judge Cutler dropped in that afternoon, she first made him promise secrecy, and then she showed it to him.

“I feel like you,” he said at last.  “An anonymous attack like this is usually beneath contempt.  And I feel all the more like ignoring it because it raises a question which I have been asking myself lately:  How can a man on a ten thousand dollar salary afford to buy an eight thousand dollar car?”

Mary couldn’t follow that line of reasoning at all.

“Why do you feel like ignoring it, if it’s such a natural question?” she asked.

“Because it’s a question that might have occurred to anybody.”

That puzzled Mary, too.

“Perhaps Burdon has money beside his salary,” she suggested.

“He hasn’t.  I know he hasn’t.  He’s in debt right now.”

They thought it over in silence.

“I think if I were you, I’d tear it up,” he said at last.

She promptly tore it into shreds.

“Now we’ll forget that,” he said.  “I must confess, however, that it has raised another question to my mind.  How long is it since your bookkeeping system was overhauled here?”

She couldn’t remember.

“Just what I thought.  It must need expert attention.  Modern conditions call for modern methods, even in bookkeeping.  I think I’ll get a good firm of accountants to go over our present system, and make such changes as will keep you in closer touch with everything that is going on.”

Mary hardly knew what to think.

“You’re sure it has nothing to do with this?” she asked, indicating the fragments in the waste-basket.

“Not the least connection!  Besides,” he argued, “you and I know very well—­don’t we?—­that with all his faults, Burdon would never do anything like that—­”

“Of course he wouldn’t!”

“Very well.  I think we ought to forget that part of it, and never refer to it again—­or it might be said that we were fearing for him.”

This masculine logic took Mary’s breath away, but though she thought it over many a time that day, she couldn’t find the flaw in it.

“Men are queer,” she finally concluded.  “But then I suppose they think women are queer, too.  To me,” she thought, “it almost seems insulting to Burdon to call accountants in now; but according to the judge it would be insulting to Burdon not to call them in—­”

She was still puzzling over it when Archey, that stormy petrel of bad news, came in and very soon took her mind from anonymous letters.