AS was only natural in a town of the size of Stafford, the sudden departure of Fred Walton, under circumstances no one seemed able to explain, caused wide and growing comment. A railroad man who had returned from Atlanta informed an eager cluster of idlers in the big office of the main hotel of the place that Fred had been seen lurking¹ about the freight-yards in the city at early daylight, evidently trying to avoid being seen. The report went out, too—and no less authority accompanied it than the word of Fred’s stepmother, who, admitting the fact that she hated the young man, could not be charged with originating a direct lie—that Fred had gone without “a thread to wear,” except what he had on when leaving. The town did not need to be told that in that detail alone lay ample evidence of the gravity of the case, even if it were not said—on good authority, too—that old Simon Walton, immediately on discovering the flight, had called in Bill Johnston to consult with him. Had he taken away money? That was the question designedly put by Walton’s business rivals, and that was the question which one and all declared the old man and Toby Lassiter had promptly³ denied. No, it was something else; that was quite plain.

Mrs. Barry heard the news at the fence the next afternoon from the voluble tongue of a poor washerwoman, a Mrs. Chumley, who, since the downfall of her only daughter, and the handsome girl’s adoption⁴ of a life of prostitution in Augusta, had lived on alone in a cottage adjoining Mrs. Barry’s, and who, as she cleansed⁵ the linen⁶ of her neighbors for a living, besmirched⁷ their characters as her only available solace⁸. She was fond of hinting darkly that if disgrace had come to her family by discovery, it hovered—ready to drop at any minute—over the heads of people not a bit better, and who were far too stuck-up for their own safety.

“You certainly ought to be glad the scamp’s gone,” she remarked to Mrs. Barry, as she leaned her bare, crinkled arms on the fence when she

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