The first week of July brought Charles Cameron a letter which recalled to him a casual promise he had made some six months ago, and about which he had completely forgotten. An elderly attorney by the name of Douglas Rivers, having met him at the City Club prior to Christmas, had found Charles Cameron a sympathetic listener and had confided the story of his life. Rivers had married quite late in life an attractive young woman who had been left penniless by the machinations of a dissolute father and a spendthrift mother. He had taken pity on her, and the pity had turned to love, as it so often does. Having never married before and being in his fifties, Rivers had found the resurgence of a new and exquisite emotion in befriending this helpless and lovely young woman. She, for her part, had reciprocated his feelings with more ardor than he had dared to hope. Out of their union had come a child, a girl, named Maude. But after this bliss, the young wife had contracted pneumonia and died when Maude was only five. Rivers had thereupon hired a housekeeper while he went to the office daily to conduct his business affairs. But now he confessed himself to be ailing- indeed, Charles Cameron had noted the elderly barrister’ s jaundiced color and sunken eye sockets and opined privately to himself that Rivers was too long for this world. As a consequence, Rivers had told him, he was greatly concerned over his little girl and what her future would be. He himself had not done too well in the marketplace of life, and while he had been always “ of the most scrupulous fidelity to the exalted legal profession which he served, pursuit of this had not brought him great material gains.

Charles Cameron had made the usual sympathetic and philosophical reflections which one does when a casual acquaintance unburdens himself of such a story, but Rivers had mistaken this for sympathetic understanding.