“Madame, I cannot accept your money,” August Damon said, flushing hotly, as he drew back from the proffered bribe; for such it seemed to him. “I am rich; I wish you to have it,” said the lady. “It is the child that we want, for her own sake, not for what you offer as an inducement to adopt her,” returned the young man, with dignity. “But I must insist,” Mrs. Marston replied. “If you have no immediate use for it, put it at interest somewhere for her, and let it accumulate for a marriage portion. You will have to name her,” she resumed, with a glance at the little one. “Call her whatever you wish, and may she prove a real blessing to you.” She approached Alice Damon as she spoke, laid the roll of bills between the soft, pink hands of the now sleeping babe, bent over her and imprinted a light kiss upon her cheek, then turning quickly away, she bowed to the husband and wife and walked abruptly from the room. A half-hour later the mysterious little stranger was sleeping peacefully in the dainty cradle that had once held Alice Damon’s namesake, while two tender, earnest faces bent fondly over her, as husband and wife prayed that she might long be spared to be a comfort and a blessing to them, and never realize the shadow that rested upon her birth. The next morning, at an early hour, Mrs. Marston and her “maid” quietly left the —— House, and the city, leaving no address, nor any clew to their destination behind them. CHAPTER IV. A CHANGE OF RESIDENCE AND AN ADVENTURE. Thus the stranger’s child found a home, with loving hearts and willing hands to care for her. But August and Alice Damon Huntress had for certain reasons withheld their surname from the mother of the child they had adopted. “I shall never put myself in the power of this woman,” he had said to his wife, while discussing the question. “If we adopt this little one we must so arrange matters that she can never be taken from us; so that she can never even be found by those who give her to us, or be told that she is not our own flesh and blood.” So he had called himself August Damon, which was the truth, as far as it went, but no one in Boston knew him by any other name than Huntress, and he did not intend that the mother of the little one should ever know what became of the child after it was given into his hands. They gave her the name of Gladys, for, as Alice Huntress said, she began to brighten and gladden their saddened hearts and lives from the moment of her coming to them. The Huntresses lived in a very quiet way, on an unpretentious street in the city of Boston. Mr. Huntress had a good salary, but they were people of simple tastes, and had more of a desire to lay by a snug sum for declining years than to live extravagantly and make a show in the world.