As she closed the door upon him, he said, “Oh, Joy, I have so much to tell you. I promised your father when he was dying that I would find you; I swore to myself that when I found you I would never leave you, save at your own command. I go now, only because you bid me go. When we meet again, there must be no more parting; and you shall hear a story stranger than the wildest fiction—the story of your father’s life. Despite your mother’s secretiveness regarding this portion of her history, the knowledge has come to me in the most unexpected manner, from the lips of the man himself.” Joy listened dreamily to the words he was saying. Her father—she was to know who her father was? Well, it did not matter much to her now—father, mother, what were they, what was anything save the fact that he had come back to her and that he loved her? She smiled silently into his eyes. Glance became entangled with glance, and would not be separated. He pushed open the almost closed door and she felt herself enveloped with arms and lips. A second later she stood alone, leaning dizzily against the door; heart, brain and blood in a mad riot of emotion. Then she fell into a chair and covered her burning face with her hands as she whispered, “Mother, mother, forgive me—I understand—I understand.” CHAPTER XX THE first shock of the awakened emotions brings recklessness to some women, and to others fear. The more frivolous plunge forward like the drunken man who leaps from the open window believing space is water. The more intense draw back, startled at the unknown world before them. The woman who thinks love is all ideality is more liable to follow into undreamed-of chasms than she who, through the complexity of her own emotions, realises its grosser elements. It was long after midnight when Joy fell into a heavy sleep, the night of Arthur Stuart’s visit. She heard the drip of the dreary November rain upon the roof, and all the light and warmth seemed stricken from the universe save the fierce fire in her own heart. When she woke in the late morning, great splashes of sunlight were leaping and quivering like living things across the foot of her bed; she sprang up, dazed for a moment by the flood of light in the room, and went to the window and looked out upon a sun-kissed world smiling in the arms of a perfect Indian summer day.