“I did not realize how much he still hoped about Preston.  And on Monday, when Preston so unexpectedly came home, he was happier than I have known him for years.  It was strange and sad that he could not see, as I saw, that whatever will power my brother had had was gone.  He could not read it in the face of his own son, who was so quick to detect it in all others!  And then came the tragedy.  Oh, John, do you think we shall ever find that girl again?—­I know you are trying but we mustn’t rest until we do.  Do you think we ever shall?  I shall never forgive myself for not following her out of the door, but, I thought she had gone to you and Mr. Bentley.”

Hodder laid the letter down, and took it up again.  He knew that Alison felt, as he felt, that they never would find Kate Marcy . . . .  He read on.

“My father wished to speak to me about the money.  He has plans for much of it, it appears, even now.  Oh.  John, he will never understand.  I want so much to see you, to talk to you—­there are times when I am actually afraid to be alone, and without you.  If it be weakness to confess that I need your reassurance, your strength and comfort constantly, then I am weak.  I once thought I could stand alone, that I had solved all problems for myself, but I know now how foolish I was.  I have been face to face with such dreadful, unimagined things, and in my ignorance I did not conceive that life held such terrors.  And when I look at my father, the thought of immortality turns me faint.  After you have come here this afternoon there can be no longer any reason why we should not meet, and all the world know it.  I will go with you to Mr. Bentley’s.

“Of course I need not tell you that I refused to inherit anything.  But I believe I should have consented if I possibly could have done so.  It seemed so cruel—­I can think of no other word—­to have, to refuse at such a moment.  Perhaps I have been cruel to him all my life—­I don’t know.  As I look back upon everything, all our relations, I cannot see how I could have been different.  He wouldn’t let me.  I still believe to have stayed with him would have been a foolish and useless sacrifice . . .  But he looked at me so queerly, as though he, too, had had a glimmering of what we might have been to each other after my mother died.  Why is life so hard?  And why are we always getting glimpses of things when it is too late?  It is only honest to say that if I had it to do all over again, I should have left him as I did.

“It is hard to write you this, but he actually made the condition of my acceptance of the inheritance that I should not marry you.  I really do not believe I convinced him that you wouldn’t have me take the money under any circumstances.  And the dreadful side of it all was that I had to make it plain to him—­after what has happened that my desire to marry you wasn’t the main reason of my refusal.  I had to tell him that even though you had not been in question, I couldn’t have taken what he wished to give me, since it had not been honestly made.  He asked me why I went on eating the food bought with such money, living under his roof?  But I cannot, I will not leave him just yet . . . .  It is two o’clock.  I cannot write any more to-night.”