"One day last winter in school I received a letter signed "Well-Wisher," asking me to meet the writer at a certain spot in the school woods that afternoon. Naturally I was excited by the mystery and all that. I was scared, too. But I went. I didn't tell anybody."
"I found a queer customer waiting for me. A man about fifty with close-cropped hair. He told me right off that he was just out of Sing Sing. Why hadn't I ever come to see my dad, he asked. He said it was pitiful the way he pined for me."
"I stammered out that I didn't know anybody could see him. He told me about the visiting days. 'Anyhow you could have written,' he said."
"'He never wrote to me,' I said.
"'Sure, doesn't he write to you every writing day! He has read me the letters. Elegant letters."
"'I never got them!' I said."
"'That's why I came,' he said. 'Dave said he thought that woman had come between you.'"
"The old fellow told me how to address a letter to my father, and he gave me money to go to Sing Sing when I could. I had an allowance from Mrs. Mansfield, but not enough for that. I wrote to my father that night."
"It was Easter before I had the chance to see my father. I made out to Mrs. Mansfield that the school closed a day later than it did, and I used that day to go to Sing Sing. My father was in the infirmary. I scarcely recognised him. They let me stay all day. Even I could see that he was dying."
"For the first time I heard the truth of the case. It was Mrs. Mansfield who had got the certificates out of the young clerks, and had brought them to my father to be filled in. When they were found out she carried on so, that he took the whole thing on himself. He thought he might as well, since he had to go to jail anyway, and he knew he would die there. Besides she promised him to have me educated and looked after. He had no one else to leave me with. At that time he still believed in her.