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THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER

me at all save in the most cursory fashion. On the eye of his mind, I realized thenceforward, I had hardly impinged. That night he talked till late with his father, and in the morning he had started for Mexico to keep the mines going, to keep the firm's head above water and Baldry Court sleek and hospitable—to keep everything bright and splendid save only his youth, which ever after that was dulled by care.

Something of this I told Margaret, to which she answered, "Oh, I know all that," and went on with her story. On Sunday, three days after their quarrel, Mr. Allington was found dead in his bed. "I wanted Chris so badly; but he never came, he never wrote," and she fell into a lethargic disposition to sit all day and watch the Thames flow by, from which she was hardly roused by finding that her father had left her nothing save an income of twenty pounds a year from unrealizable