love, Robert Clay.''

He gave the note to his servant, and the answer was brought
to him almost immediately. Hope had not rewritten her message:
``I love you because you are the sort of man you are, and had you
given up as father wished you to do, or on my account, you would
have been some one else, and I would have had to begin over again
to learn to love you for some different reasons. I know that you
will come back to me bringing your sheaves with you. Nothing can
happen to you now. Hope.''

He had never received a line from her before, and he read and
reread this with a sense of such pride and happiness in his face
that MacWilliams smiled covertly and bent his eyes upon his
instrument. Clay went back into his room and kissed the page of
paper gently, flushing like a boy as he did so, and then folding
it carefully, he put it away beneath his jacket. He glanced
about him guiltily, although he was quite alone, and taking out
his watch, pried it open and looked down into the face of the
photograph that had smiled up at him from it for so many years.
He thought how unlike it was to Alice Langham as he knew her. He
judged that it must have been taken when she was very young, at
the age Hope was then, before the little world she lived in had
crippled and narrowed her and marked her for its own. He
remembered what she had said to him the first night he had
seen her. ``That is the picture of the girl who ceased to exist
four years ago, and whom you have never met.'' He wondered if
she had ever existed.

``It looks more like Hope than her sister,'' he mused. ``It