"He cares! He does care!" she repeated over and over. "Oh, my boy! My boy!" And then her eyes fell upon the thick envelope with its worn edges and open flap which lay unheeded upon the desk-top.
Mechanically she reached for it, and her hand came in contact with its thick, heavily engraved contents. She raised the papers to the light and stared; there were five in all, neatly folded, lying one upon another.
The green background of the topmost one was faded and streaked, and a thin, green wash had trickled over the edges of the others, staining them.
A yellow slip of paper fluttered to the desk. She picked it up and read the almost illegible, typewritten lines. It was a memorandum addressed to Strang, Liebhardt & Co., and bearing the faded signature of Hiram Carmody.
A sudden numbness overcame the girl. She sank slowly into the chair in front of the desk and stared dully from the yellowed slip of paper to the faded green bonds.
The room seemed suddenly cold, and she stared, unseeing, at her bloodless finger-tips. She tried to think—to concentrate her mind upon the present—but her brain refused to act, and she muttered helplessly:
"The bonds—the bonds—he took the bonds!"
Like one in a dream, she arose and replenished the fire in the little air-tight. It had burned almost to ashes.
She watched the yellow flames lick hungrily at the bubbling pitch of the knot she had thrown upon the coals, and glanced from the flaring flames to the little pile of green papers—and back again at the little flames that climbed higher about the resinous chunk.
"Why not?" she muttered. "They can never prove he took them, and he would think that they were lost." For a long time she sat, thinking, and then she closed the stove and returned to the desk.