bar across a door opening into another department. As he opened this
door, Marion rushed forward and was first to greet a slender,
pale-faced girl, who stepped out eagerly toward her rescuers.

"Helen!" cried the girls in a chorus.

Jake slipped out and was seen no more.

* * * * *




CHAPTER XXII.

A SLEIGHRIDE HOME.


That was a meeting not soon to be forgotten. It was a signal for the
casting away of every element of secrecy, and Helen told her story.

She told the story of her brother, of his sickness when a child, of
the resultant distortion of his character into that of a man of
strange and incongruous genius and weakness, and of the embarrassment
he had caused her and her mother. He, it was, she said, who had
written the skull-and-cross-bones letter.

"Who wrote the other anonymous letter that you received at the
Institute?" Hazel Edwards inquired.