Is it permissible to steal a fragment from later history in order to elucidate what has gone before? It is a responsibility the fictional historian must sometimes take.

Judith and Ann and Baird are of the present. Life has woven them into subsequent history, drawing from a skein as tangled as was the skein of thirteen years ago. The fragment I pilfer is the conclusion of a letter from Judith to Ann, penned in our day, and part of another story:

"I have written you a few facts, Ann. I have one more thing to tell you, something that reaches back beyond these years of mutual antagonism.... The day after Nickolas Baird married you, Coats Penniman came to see me, and told me the following: that Sue had found certain letters of Garvin's to you which gave him the erroneous impression that Garvin had wronged you. Then he went, hot from reading them, to the Mine Banks, thinking he would find you with Garvin. That he met Garvin at the first ore-pit and accused him, and that Garvin denied it. That he gave Garvin the lie and they drew their pistols, that they fired, and that Garvin wounded him in the shoulder, disabling his pistol arm. That Garvin had leveled to fire again, when, suddenly, Edward appeared and tried to hold Garvin back, and that Garvin's pistol went off. Coats thought the shot had gone wild until he saw Edward drop. He said that Garvin laughed wildly then and ran back into the Banks.

"Coats said that Edward had passed instantly. He realized then some of the complications that were certain to follow, and that he went directly home, and that Sue drove him into the city, where he had his wound dressed.

"Coats said that he had had no intention of shirking his responsibility, that he had simply waited for events to shape themselves, and that what followed made any action on his part unnecessary, but that he had determined to come to me with his confession as soon as he felt that your future was assured. He told me to proceed against him if I thought fit, that he would face any charge I made. I thought I had paid my last debt to Westmore, but I was mistaken; I told Coats to take his secret back with him and keep it.

"And I have kept it until to-day. Now I turn it over to you, together with my confession: for the sake of my family's good name, I did the thing that saved you from disgrace; I saved one brother at, what seemed to me, a lesser expense to the other.

"Take what I have told you and add it to your already full experience of lives inextricably tangled because of you. Wherever you have cast your net, you have brought in a heavy haul.... Judith."

And from Ann's reply also a fragment:

"... and what you have told me is not new to me. Coats told me long ago, while I still lay ill. Coats told me, and dear old Ben told me all he knew—I made them tell me, for I knew that my father had never forsaken me—of his own free will.

"And, Judith, I also know just why you have written all this to me. Throughout these years it has been a Westmore pitted against a nobody's child. But I feel no bitterness, only an immense interest, for out of it all has grown a wonderful thing.... Ann."

THE END