he owned. He trusted me—he LOVED me. And he died thinking I had ruined him—I—Tom Carrisford, who played cricket at Eton with him. What a villain he must have thought me!”

“Don’t reproach yourself so bitterly.”

“I don’t reproach myself because the speculation threatened to fail—I reproach myself for losing my courage. I ran away like a swindler and a thief, because I could not face my best friend and tell him I had ruined him and his child.”

The good-hearted father of the Large Family put his


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again covered her head with the bedclothes.

The change in her life did not come about gradually, but was made all at once.

“She must begin as she is to go on,” Miss Minchin said to Miss Amelia. “She must be taught at once what she is to expect.”

Mariette had left the house the next morning. The glimpse


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