too long to say that last week my friend, my counselor, and benefactress
Marian Douglass, passed away. For years she held safely for me the
principal of the money I had been wasting. Now that she is gone, and he
knows it, I must at once make it secure in some other way. To-morrow, if
you will allow me, I will come again and bring witnesses. No other man
in Dalton would be so worthy of the trust. Thousands of dollars have
almost made themselves in ways planned and carried out by Marian
Douglass, who held this money both for me and from me, but now a part of
this must be used to find my wife and my daughter Nellie, and then to
run down their persecutors, for I have been a tool, simply, in the hands
of those who took what I had and who have been trying for years to get
the rest. If nothing happens to me to-night I will come to-morrow
morning, after that we may tell the town who it was who tried to spoil
the fair name of Dalton."

He pressed Dorothy's hand to his lips as he left. She felt a tear fall
upon it; and she knew that all her prayers and all her efforts to save
this man from his evil ways had not been in vain, and with the happiness
that comes always in the knowledge of good accomplished, a new resolve
came into her heart--she would some day find Nellie Burlock.




CHAPTER VI

AT THE SWING


The strange story of the reformed man filled Dorothy's brain with