“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.  “I trust you, Robert,” it said.  “It is in you to do heedless things, to be reckless, if only because you are young and eager and strong; but it is not in you to be dishonourable; of this I am as certain as I am of anything in life.  Some day the truth will be known and you will be cleared, but whether it is or no, I choose to walk beside you.  I choose it gladly, happily.  I write the words again, gladly, happily, Robert.  Yours, Mary.”

“Oh!” cried Margaret Elizabeth, lifting a glowing face, “I love Mary.”

“She was brave and unselfish,” said the Candy Man.

Margaret Elizabeth nodded.  “Yes, that is one side of it.  Still, you see, she was sure, and it was, as she says, a joy to cast in her lot with him.  ‘Gladly, happily.’” Her eyes shone.  She gazed far away down the river.  The wind blew little tendrils of bright hair across her cheek.  “It must be so when you care very much,” she went on.

“But,” argued the Candy Man, “under the stress of very noble feeling people sometimes do foolish things, do they not?”

“But this was not.  Do you think for a moment Mary ever regretted it?  I see what you mean by the best of you.  It is something to have such credentials.”  Margaret Elizabeth’s gaze met the Candy Man’s, and her eyes were deep as they had been on Christmas Eve, in the firelight.