He shook his head.  “I haven’t bothered much about them, except now and then for a bit of nonsense making.”

“But this pair you, too, are going to go on trusting?”

“I am.  If that girl was Miss Linton she had a reason for not speaking.  If it wasn’t”—­he drew a deep breath—­“well, I don’t know exactly how to explain that!”

“I do,” said Ellen Burns, smiling.  “She thought she would never see you again, and she yielded to a girlish desire to look hard at—­a real man.”

It was this speech which, in spite of himself, lingered in King’s mind after she was gone, for the balm there was in it—­a balm she had perfectly understood and meant to put there.  Well she guessed what his disablement meant to him—­in spite of the hope of complete recovery—­how little he seemed to himself like the man he was before.

Certainly it was nothing short of real manhood which prompted the talk he had with his mother one day not long after this.  She brought him a letter, and she was scrutinizing it closely as she came toward him.  He was fathoms deep in his work and did not observe her until she spoke.

“Whom can you possibly have as a correspondent in this town, my son?” she inquired, her eyes upon the postmark, which was that of a small city a hundred miles away.  It was one in which lived an old school friend of whom she had never spoken, to her recollection, in King’s hearing, for the reason that the family had since suffered deep disgrace in the eyes of the world, and she had been inexpressibly shocked thereby.

King looked up.  He was always hoping for a word from Anne Linton, and now, suddenly, it had come, just a week after the encounter with the girl in the car—­which had been going, as it happened, in the opposite direction from the city of the postmark.  He recognized instantly the handwriting upon the plain, white business envelope—­an interesting handwriting, clear and black, without a single feminine flourish.  He took the letter in his hand and studied it.

“It is from Miss Linton,” he said, “and I am very glad to hear from her.  It is the first time she has written since she went away—­over two months ago.”

He spoke precisely as he would have spoken if it had been a letter from any friend he had.  It was like him to do this, and the surer another man would have been to try to conceal his interest in the letter the surer was Jordan King to proclaim it.  The very fact that this announcement was certain to rouse his mother’s suspicion that the affair was of moment to him was enough to make him tell her frankly that she was quite right.

He laid the letter on the desk before him unopened, and went on with his work.  Mrs. King stood still and looked at him a moment before moving quietly away, and disturbance was written upon her face.  She knew her son’s habit of finishing one thing before he took up another, but she understood also that he wished to be alone when he should read this letter.  She left the room, but soon afterward she softly passed the open door, and she saw that the letter lay open before him and that his head was bent over it.  The words before him were these: