She thought it was the moan of the wind rising at first, then it sounded again almost at her feet--the shrill, sharp wail of an infant. Xenie turned around and saw, not twenty paces from her, a little bundle of soft, white flannel lying upon the wet sand. She ran forward with a scream of joy, and picked it up in her arms, and drew aside one corner of the little embroidered blanket. Joy, joy! it was Lora's baby--Lora's baby, lying forlorn and deserted on the wet sand with the hungry waves rolling ever nearer and nearer toward it, as though eager to draw it down in their cold and fatal embrace. With a low murmur of joy, Xenie kissed the cold little face and folded it closely in her arms. "Lora cannot be very far now," she thought, her heart beating wildly with joy. "She was so weak the babe has slipped from her arms, and she did not know it. She will come back directly to find it." She ran along the shore, looking through the gray dawn light everywhere for her sister, and calling aloud in tender accents: "Lora, Lora, my darling!" But suddenly, as she looked, she saw a strangely familiar form coming toward her along the sand. It was a man clothed in a gray tweed traveling suit, such as tourists wear abroad. He stopped with a cry of surprise as they met, and there on the wild shores of France, with the rain beating down on her bare head and thin dress, with Lora's baby tightly clasped in her bare arms, Xenie St. John found herself face to face with her enemy. CHAPTER XV. Like one stricken motionless by terror, she stood still and looked up into the proud face and scornful blue eyes of the man she had thought far, far away beneath the skies of his native land. The ground seemed slipping from beneath her feet, the wild elements seemed whirling aimlessly over her head; she forgot Lora, she forgot the child that nestled against her breast; she remembered nothing else but her enemy's presence and the deadly peril to which her secret was exposed. "Howard Templeton," she panted forth wildly, "why are you here?" "Mrs. St. John," he returned, with a bitter smile, "I might rather ask you that question. What are _you_ doing here in this stormy dawn, with your bare head and your thin slippers and evening dress? Permit me to offer you my cloak. Do you forget that it is cold and rainy, that you court certain death for yourself and the--the----" He paused without ending the sentence and looked at the little white bundle lying helpless in her arms, and a steely gleam of hatred flared into his eyes. "The child," she said, finishing the sentence for him with a passionate quiver of joy in her voice, "_my_ child--Howard Templeton--the little one that has come to me to avenge his mother's wrongs. Look at him. This is your uncle's heir, this tiny little babe! He will strip you of every dollar you now hold so unjustly, and his mother's revenge will then be complete."