And he did his work well, Alan." A second time she had spoken his name, softly and without embarrassment.
With her nervous fingers tying and untying the two corners of a little handkerchief in her lap, she went on, after a moment of silence in which the ticking of Keok's clock seemed tense and loud.
"When I was seventeen, Grandfather Standish died.

I wish you could understand all that followed without my telling you: how I clung to Sharpleigh as a father, how I trusted him, and how cleverly and gently he educated me to the thought that it was right and just, and my greatest duty in life, to carry out the stipulation of my grandfather's will and marry John Graham.

Otherwise, he told me--if that union was not brought about before I was twenty-two--not a dollar of the great fortune would go to the house of Standish; and because he was clever enough to know that money alone would not urge me, he showed me a letter which he said my Uncle Peter had written, and which I was to read on my seventeenth birthday, and in that letter Uncle Peter urged me to live up to the Standish name and join in that union of the two great fortunes which he and Grandfather Standish had always planned.

I didn't dream the letter was a forgery.

And in the end they won--and I promised." She sat with bowed head, crumpling the bit of cambric between her fingers.