“I have often wondered,” Aunt Anna began her story that was to explain so much that the girls had not understood; “I have often wondered that you did not remember your uncle, my younger brother Jack. When you talked of things you had done when you were small children, I used to listen hungrily, hoping you might speak of him, but you never did. He was with us a great deal when you were little things, and he was always in the nursery or playing with you in the garden, for he loved children. That was soon after I came to live with you, and when he was in college, studying to be an engineer. He spent all his vacations with us: I wish you had not been too young to remember.”

Beatrice wrinkled her brows and vainly searched for a fleeting recollection.

“I don’t remember anything clearly,” she said at last. “There has been so much between.”

“When my brother left college he went to work immediately and was so eager and interested in his first ‘job.’ It was the building of a dam and reservoir for the water supply of a town near us, a project that was being financed by the company of which your father is a director. It was through his means that Jack was put in charge of the work, although he was very young for such responsibility, too young, I insisted at the time. And it was proved that he was too young. He did his work well, he was a brilliant engineer, but he trusted too much to the honor of other people and he—he did not take things as an older man would.”

She paused, and Nancy, putting down her knitting, came to sit on the floor beside her chair.

“Poor Aunt Anna,” she said, “did something dreadful happen?”

Slowly her aunt nodded, looking steadily into the fire, as though tears might come should she allow her eyes to waver.

“Yes,” she answered, “something happened that has darkened my life, every day of it, for all these years.

“We did not see so much of my brother after he began working, for he was absorbed and busy. As is usual in such cases, a contractor was doing the work under his planning and his supervision. Things went very well—for some months. Then one day, like a thunderclap, came the news that the project was being carried on with gross dishonesty. A great deal more money had been advanced for the work than had actually been spent on construction, false records of costs had been turned in, machinery ordered and not paid for, debts incurred on every side, with many thousands of dollars completely vanished. Some one, it was evident, had been pocketing the difference, and an immediate investigation was set on foot.

“It was a terrible blow to your father. I do not know myself what he thought when the facts first became known, but he at once asked some of his fellow-directors to meet at his house and said that Jack would be there to explain matters to them before there should be a formal meeting of the whole board next day. They called me in to act as secretary, since they wanted a record kept but desired the whole affair to be kept private. I can remember how my knees shook as I went in and sat down at the end of the library table. There were five men there, most of them gray-headed, all of them unspeaking, even your father. I was in a wild hurry to have Jack come. I wanted the matter cleared quickly. I could hardly keep from crying out in the storm of impatience and suspense I felt during those minutes we waited.

“He came at last and I can shut my eyes and see him still, standing before that group of grave men, so young, so white-faced and excited, so eager to explain. They asked him questions and he answered them in the straight-forward way he always had. They looked more serious and questioned him again, while my hands shook as I wrote down the answers, they were so frank and open, and they were doing him so much harm.

“‘Why had he not gone over the accounts more thoroughly?’

“He had felt that his work was the scientific end of the enterprise. He had left financial matters almost entirely to the contractor, who, so he had considered, was completely honest.

“‘Did he suspect the man now?’

“It was plain from the misappropriation of the funds that the man had been robbing them.

“‘Yes, but could he offer material proof that it was the contractor, and he alone, who had been pocketing the money?’

“No, he had no proof, so far.

“He was so inexperienced, so sure that every one was as honorable as he, so certain that everybody had equal faith in him. He was half-way through the interview before he realized what they suspected.

“I had thought, when he came in, how much of a boy he was still. Then, all in one moment, I saw him grow to be a man. The idea that they might consider him guilty seemed to deal him a staggering blow, as though some one had actually struck him between the eyes.

“‘You believe that I have profited by this dirty business, you think that my own hands are not clean?’ he cried out suddenly, and waited a long minute for some one to answer.

“In every group there is always at least one man of a certain type, hard, inflexible, strict with himself, and merciless to others. Robert Kirby was the man of that sort in our company that day. He sat at the opposite end of the table from me, and I had watched him nervously as he turned his little sharp eyes on Jack and never moved them from his face. By some terrible mischance it was he who found words first.

“‘After all you have said,’ he declared in his cutting voice, ‘it would be hard for any of us to believe otherwise.’

“Jack wheeled to your father and faced him, not with a question, but an accusation.

“‘You believe it too!’ he cried.

“Your father is slow of speech at best and he was excited and upset. He voiced his faith in his brother, but he spoke a second too late.

“‘You all of you believe it, every one. It is because your eyes are as blind as the dollars you are always counting.’

“He turned so quickly to the door that no one could stop him. I was the only one that managed to move as he flung it open.

“‘Not I.’ With all my strength I called it after him as I stood up in my place at the end of the table. ‘Oh Jack, not I!’

“But the door had slammed so quickly that I think he did not hear.

“We all sat very still, unable to speak, ashamed even to look at one another. Robert Kirby again was the first to break the silence.

“‘He should be stopped; he must be put under arrest,’ he said, but your father got up and stood with his back against the door.

“‘If it is true that my brother is guilty, and Heaven grant it is not so,’ he declared, ‘all the money shall be repaid at once. This matter is to go no farther.’

“We never saw Jack again. Your father had a letter from him, saying that of course he considered himself responsible for the losses to the company since his own folly had brought them about. ‘Other people may think I am guilty if they like. If you and Anna do not believe in me I do not care what decision Robert Kirby and his friends come to,’ he added. He had disposed of all the property left to him by our father and was turning over the sum realized to cover the defaulted amount. There was a little lacking, a few hundred dollars, and this he was obliged—you could see even in that business-like letter how it hurt him to do so—to ask your father to advance. In return he was delivering to him the title deeds ‘to that piece of land in Montana, Anna can tell you about it, there is no time to sell that in a hurry and I want this infernal business closed.’ That was the only letter we ever received from him, and that was ten years ago.

“The land he spoke of was this bit of hillside, with the cabin, where we are living now. We took a gay journey, during one of Jack’s vacations, just vaguely ‘West’ because he had always said there was the best opening for a man in the Western States, and he hoped to live there some day. His grandmother had given him a thousand dollars, ‘just to see how he would invest it,’ she said, and was a little dismayed when he came back and told her he had purchased a part of a mountain in Montana. We had been to the Coast; we had seen the Grand Ca?on and Yellowstone Park. It was a man we met in the Park who persuaded Jack to buy this piece of land, saying that the timber on it was worth a good deal and there was always the chance of a mine. We come over to see the purchase and spent a day in Ely, though most of it was put in riding through the hills and scrambling over as many steep trails as we could find. We climbed so high we could see valley after valley spread out below us, and the air was so clear one felt that it was possible to see halfway round the world if only the mountains did not block the way. There were two or three riders scattered over the trail below, tiny black figures like toys, although everything was so still we could hear their voices shouting to one another and could hear the plunge and splash of a waterfall a mile away. It had been snowing on the peaks, but where we were it was hot in the blazing sunshine. Jack sat staring, staring, and staring into the valley and at last he said:

“Anna, from a height like this you ought to be able to see what sort of a place the world really is.”

“I have never forgotten.”

A burning pine cone fell from the heap of coals and rolled out on the hearth. Beatrice, who had been listening so intently that she had not moved, rose now and fell to mending the fire.

“And did you never find any trace of him?” Nancy gently brought Aunt Anna back to her story.

“Never, my dear, though we tried in every way you could imagine. He was determined to disappear out of our lives, and we were not able to prevent it. A year or two later the same contractor was proved to be connected with some such scandalous frauds that he was sent to the penitentiary. The first matter was dropped on account of your father’s influence and the fact that Jack had made restitution, so that the man was bolder when he tried again. Your father had made some effort to procure proof against him, but there was nothing definite enough to exonerate Jack before the world. When the man was finally convicted, we thought that must surely clear my brother’s name. Yet I was present when your father laid the facts before Robert Kirby, who only grunted and said that nothing could convince him that they had not worked together the first time. When I say my prayers and come to the place where we must forgive our enemies, I have to struggle with myself all over again to forgive Robert Kirby, although all the time I know him to be nothing but a misled, ignorant, obstinate old man.”

“I would call him something worse,” declared Nancy with heat.

There was quiet for a little as they all sat thinking.

“And did you think that you might find him here, Aunt Anna?” Beatrice finally asked slowly.

“I thought we might find him or get news of him. When the doctor said this year I must go away or—or not get well, I vowed that, if it were the last thing I did, I would look for him once more. He loved this place so much that I always felt, somehow, that he would come back to it. We had written to him here, but the letters came back to us with word that no such person was to be found; and your father made inquiries when he came to get us a house. He did not approve much of our settling down here for the summer, but I was determined and he had to give way.”

“Yet we almost had to go back,” Nancy observed.

“Yes, if it had not been for Beatrice’s thinking of the cabin and for her courage in bringing us here, we would have had to give it up. And so far we have heard nothing, but I cannot help hoping that we still may.”

“But why, Aunt Anna, why did you never tell us before?” Beatrice put the question with the same puzzled frown she had worn when the story began.

“I wanted to, but I could not bear to. You were always so hurried and so deep in affairs of your own, as is the natural thing. To tell you and have you think, even for a fleeting minute, that my brother did wrong—that would have been beyond endurance. He is only a name to you, and after all, as Robert Kirby says, nothing has ever been proved. But you must believe in my brother; you must.”

She leaned back and a slow tear of weariness and long-endured misery rolled down her cheek. The recital had tired her far more than they had realized, so that Nancy, suddenly taking alarm, whisked her away to bed. There, with many loving pats and hugs and words of affectionate comfort, they at last saw her ready for sleep.

Yet Beatrice, lying broad awake in her little room, watching the curtains flutter in the windy dark, could not put from her mind the thought of what she had heard. Presently she got up to steal into Nancy’s room opposite and see how she was faring. She found that the bed was empty and that her sister was kneeling by the window, staring out into the forest. A solitary coyote was yelping in the woods, but it was a sound to which they had become so accustomed that it was doubtful if they even heard it. The pale light of a late moon showed the moving tree-tops, the dark chasm of the stream, and, hardly to be discerned among the pines, the square chimney stacks and one tiny light that marked the place of John Herrick’s house.

“Don’t stay there in the cold,” remonstrated Beatrice. “You can’t see anything or—or anybody in the middle of the night.”

“I know it,” sighed Nancy as she turned from the window. “I was just thinking.”

She climbed on the bed and sat with her knees humped and her arm flung around them, still staring, as though fascinated, out through the window toward that slope of the mountain where John Herrick lived.

“He doesn’t look like dad or Aunt Anna,” Beatrice protested suddenly, with no apparent connection with anything that had been said. “No, he isn’t like them at all.”

“Maybe not,” returned Nancy inscrutably, “but he has that same light yellow hair that she has. If Aunt Anna were very sunburnt or he were very pale—it might be—that they would not be so very different.”