POLLY had spent an unhappy day. Her secret—for so she termed her discovery of the night before—weighed heavily upon her, and yet she felt it was impossible to part with it, even to Clarke. Some instinct of loyalty to the doctor who had been almost a parent to her influenced her to silence, though she was naturally outspoken and given to leaning on those she loved. She was sitting in the parlor, her back to the window. She had seen the doctor pass once that day and she did not want to meet his eye again. Fear had taken the place of reverence, and confidence had given way to distrust.

Suddenly she heard a door open, and rose up startled, for the sound was in the front hall and the family were all in the kitchen. Could it be Clarke returning, or her father, or—she had not time to push her conjectures further, for at this point the door of the room in which she stood swung quickly open and in the gap she saw Dr. Izard, with a face so pale that it reminded her of the glimpse she had caught of him the previous night. But there was purpose instead of the blank look of somnambulism in his eyes, and that purpose was directed toward her.

“Polly,” he said, not advancing, but holding her fascinated in her place by the intensity of his look, “do not allow yourself to be constrained to sign any check to-day. To-morrow you will no longer consider it your duty.” And before she could answer or signify her assent he was gone, and the front door had shut after him. The deep breath which escaped her lips showed what that one moment of terror had been to her. Springing to the window she looked out and started as she saw him take the direction of Carberry hill.

“He is going to see my father,” she murmured, and moved by a new terror she seized her hat and coat, and ran, rather than walked, to Mrs. Unwin’s cottage. “Where is Clarke?” was her breathless demand as she rushed impetuously into the house. “Dr. Izard is on his way to Carberry hill and I am afraid, or rather I know, there is going to be trouble between him and my father.”

“Then Clarke will prevent it. Dr. Izard sent him word an hour ago to meet him there at five o’clock, and he has been gone from the house just five minutes.”

“Oh, what is going to happen? I must see; I must go. They do not know Dr. Izard as well as I do.” And without waiting to explain her somewhat enigmatical sentence she dashed from the house and took her way up Carberry hill.

It was the first time she had been there since she was surprised at her father’s door by that father’s fatal and unexpected return; and had it not been for the excitement under which she was laboring, her limbs would have faltered and her whole soul quailed at the prospect. But love lent her wings, and a certain dogged persistence in duty which underlay the natural effervescence of her spirits kept her to her task, and so before she realized it she was at the top of that haunted hill and on the doorstep of the house which was even more repellent to her now than when the moss hung from the eaves and the seal of desolation lay upon the door.

Hearing from within the voices that she knew, she waited to give no summons, but opened the door and passed in. Three men were in the hall—Dr. Izard, Ephraim Earle, and Clarke—and from the faces they turned toward her she judged that she was not a minute too soon.

“Polly!” leaped simultaneously from the lips of her lover and from those of Dr. Izard. But the one spoke in a sort of tender surprise and the other with a mixture of anger and constraint.

“Do not mind me,” she said. “I saw you coming here, and I felt that I ought to be present.” And the determination in her face startled those who had always regarded her as a petted child. Her father, who was the only person there who seemed at all at his ease, smiled and gave her a sarcastic bow.

“This is the first time you have honored me,” he observed, and pushed a chair slightly forward. “Women are proverbially fond of controversy; why deny this very young girl, the privilege of hearing our little talk?”

The doctor, who perhaps saw more in this intrusion than the others, hesitated for a moment, with his brows lowered over his uneasy eyes, then he waved his hand as if dismissing a subject of no importance, and without saying yea or nay to the appeal which had just been made to him, he cried out in a set and desperate voice:

“I have borne with this impostor long enough. I do not know who you are,” he continued, pointing imperatively at the man before him, “but that you are not Ephraim Earle is certain. Therefore you shall no longer enjoy Ephraim Earle’s rights or profit by the money which was given to Polly for a very different purpose.”

Earle, thus attacked, first raised his brows and then smiled suavely. “You would force an issue then,” he cried. “Very well, I’m ready. Why am I not Ephraim Earle, Dr. Izard? You assert the fact, but that is not proving it. When we were young men together you were not wont to stop at assertion.”

“We were never young men together. You are a stranger to the town, a stranger to me. The letter which you wrote may deceive Polly, may deceive Clarke, may deceive every one else who reads, but it does not deceive me. What is this new invention you failed to project? Tell us on the spot or I will brand you as a wholesale deceiver up and down the town.”

“I——” the man stammered, his bold effrontery failing him for the moment.

“Have you forgotten it again?” sneered the doctor, seeming to grow taller and broader as his antagonist dwindled. “I expected you would hide behind that excuse. It is a convenient one. You have forgotten it; well, we will let that pass and you shall tell me instead why your first one failed to operate the first time you tried it.”

“I will not,” shouted Earle, driven apparently to bay. “That it did fail you remember and so do I, but after fourteen years devoted to other subjects I am not going to try and pick up those old threads again and explain to you every step by which I won success at last.”

“But I will wait,” suggested the doctor. “You shall not be hurried; there is nothing more important to be done in town just now.”

“Isn’t there? I think there is, Dr. Izard. You have shown yourself my enemy ever since I came to Hamilton; but for reasons that were satisfactory to me I have let it pass, as you have let my so-called imposture pass. I did not wish to stir up old grievances; but you attack me and must expect to be yourself attacked. Of what complaint did Huldah Earle die? Answer me that! Or I will brand you for a——”

“Hush!” The word sprang from Clarke, who had seen the doctor cower, as if some awful weight were about to be heaved upon him. “Weigh your words, Mr. Earle; for if you utter an untrue one you shall be brought to dearly rue it.”

“I will weigh them,” answered the other, growi............