“Mr. Taggett has written out everything at length in this memorandum-book, and you must read it for yourself.  There are expressions and statements in these pages, Margaret, that will necessarily shock you very much; but you should remember, as I tried to while reading them, that Mr. Taggett has a heart of steel; without it he would be unable to do his distressing work.  The cold impartiality with which he sifts and heaps up circumstances involving the doom of a fellow-creature appears almost inhuman; but it is his business.  No, don’t look at it here!” said Mr. Slocum, recoiling; he had given the book to Margaret.  “Take it into the other room, and read it carefully by yourself.  When you have finished, come back and tell me what you think.”

“But, papa, surely you”—­

“I don’t believe anything, Margaret!  I don’t know the true from the false any more!  I want you to help me out of my confusion, and you cannot do it until you have read that book.”

Margaret made no response, but passed into the parlor and closed the folding-doors behind her.

After an absence of half an hour she reentered the breakfast room, and laid Mr. Taggett’s diary on the table beside her father, who had not moved from his place during the interval.  Margaret’s manner was collected, but it was evident, by the dark circles under her eyes, and the set, colorless lips, that that half hour had been a cruel thirty minutes to her.  In Margaret’s self-possession Mr. Slocum recognized, not for the first time, the cropping out of an ancestral trait which had somehow managed to avoid him in its wayward descent.

“Well?” he questioned, looking earnestly at Margaret, and catching a kind of comfort from her confident bearing.

“It is Mr. Taggett’s trade to find somebody guilty,” said Margaret, “and he has been very ingenious and very merciless.  He was plainly at his wits’ ends to sustain his reputation, and would not have hesitated to sacrifice any onen rather than wholly fail.”

“But you have been crying, Margaret.”

“How could I see Richard dragged down in the dust in this fashion, and not be mortified and indignant?”

“You don’t believe anything at all of this?”

“Do you?" asked Margaret, looking through and through him.

“I confess I am troubled.”

“If you doubt Richard for a second,” said Margaret, with a slight quiver of her lip, “that will be the bitterest part of it to me.”

“I don’t give any more credit to Mr. Taggett’s general charges than you do, Margaret; but I understand their gravity better.  A perfectly guiltless man, one able with a single word to establish his innocence, is necessarily crushed at first by an accusation of this kind.  Now, can Richard set these matters right with a single word?  I am afraid he has a world of difficulty before him.”

“When he returns he will explain everything.  How can you question it?”