Fearing, even feeling, the infernal certainty that this child was not his own, he planned with diabolical cruelty to hurt her to the limit of his powers and to the end of her days. He knew she would hunger for this baby boy of hers, that her heart could be broken through him, that her punishment could be made full and complete. He sequestered the child in a place where he could not be found, and went his own way, grimly certain that he was making her pay! She died when Frederic was twelve years old, without having seen him again after that dreadful hour when, protesting her innocence, she had been turned out into the night and told to go whither she would, but never to return to the house she had disgraced. James Brood heard of her death when in the heart of China, and he was a haggard wreck for months thereafter. He had worshipped this beautiful Viennese. He could not wreak vengeance upon a dead woman; he could not hate a dead woman. He had always loved her. It was after this that he stood on the firing-line of many a fiercely fought battle in the Orient, inviting the bullet that would rip through his heart. It was not courage, but cowardice, that put him in spots where the bullets were thickest; it was not valour that sent him among the bayonets and sabres of a fanatical enemy. It was the thing at the bottom of his soul that told him she would come to him once more when the strife was ended, and that she was waiting for him somewhere beyond the border to hear his plea for pardon! Of such flimsy shreds is man's purpose made! Five years after his return to New York he brought her son back to the house in lower Fifth Avenue and tried, with bitterness in his soul, to endure the word “father” as it fell from lips to which the term was almost strange. The old men, they who sat by the fire on this wind-swept night and waited for the youth of twenty-two to whom the blue missive was addressed, knew the story of James Brood and his wife Matilde, and they knew that the former had no love in his heart for the youth who bore his name. Their lips were sealed. Garrulous on all other subjects, they were as silent as the grave on this. They, too, were constrained to hate the lad. He made not the slightest pretence of appreciating their position in the household. To him they were pensioners, no more, no less; to him their deeds of valour were offset by the deeds of his father; there was nothing left over for a balance on that score. He was politely considerate; he was even kindly disposed toward their vagaries and whims; he endured them because there was nothing else left for him to do. But, for all that, he despised them; justifiably, no doubt, if one bears in mind the fact that they signified more to James Brood than did his long-neglected son.