admired the sensitiveness and fine feeling for self-respect which kept Abel silent as to this lack, and I really almost hate to be setting it down here in cold ink. Still, the picture is incomplete without it, for it was consciousness of this deficiency which put him so helplessly at the mercy of others and kept him a prisoner in his own mind.
I tried to blink the suspicion when it first presented itself to me. I didn't want to know it even if it were true. But when the checks in payment for winter services returned to me after many days backed with "Abel Xhismark Goodfriend," the thing was writ clear and inescapable. He may not realize that the evidence comes back to us, or it may be that surmise of it torments his solitary hours. But it is never spoken of. He does not know what he has been spared, along with what he has been robbed of. The sensationalism, the vulgarity, the diffuseness that follows in the train of such reading as is likely to come within his radius, one might thankfully remain a stranger to. But he could know only of the deprivation, necessarily greater in the region of his
