No more different being from her who had entered an hour before by the long passages and staircases of the great hotel could have been than she who now repassed through them, looking neither to the right nor to the left--a woman like a straight line of motion and energy, as strong and stiff as iron, with expression banished from her face, and elasticity from her figure. She went back by the same streets she had come by, making her way straight through the crowd, which seemed to yield before the strength of passion and pain that was in her. There was a singing in her ears, and a buzzing in her head, and her heart was in her breast as if it had been turned to stone. Oh, she was not at her first shock of disappointment and despair. She had experienced it before; but never, she thought, in such terrible sort as now. She had so wrapped herself in this dream, which had been suggested to her by nothing but her own heart, what she thought her instinct, a sudden flash of divination, the voice of nature. She had felt sure of it the first glimpse she had of him, before he had even told her his name. She had been sure that this time it was the voice of nature, that intuition of a mother which could not be deceived. So many likenesses seemed to meet in Harry Gordon’s face, so many circumstances to combine in establishing the likelihood, at least, that this was he. South America, the very ideal place for an adventurer, and the strange fact that he had a mother living whom he did not know. A mother living! These words made a thrill of passion, of opposition, of unmoved and immovable conviction, rush through all her veins. A mother living! Who could that be but she? What would such a man care--a man who had abandoned his wife at the moment of a woman’s greatest weakness, and taken her child from her when she was helpless to resist him--for the ruin of her reputation after, for fixing upon her, among those who knew her not, the character of a profligate? He who had done the first, why should he hesitate to say the last? The one thing cost him trouble, the other none. It was easier to believe that than to give up what she concluded with certainty was her last hope.