“Go now! If you ever seek to cross my path, beware! You may haunt the peopled solitudes around me and meet me as a chance acquaintance. “Your ‘society drill’ will hold you in your place in the poor parade of this superficial life.” She dropped her eyes, and her impassioned voice echoed sadly on his ears. He was defeated, and an agony rent his heart. “Let me do something for you, Margaret,” he pleaded. “I am above your power to aid,” the proud woman replied. “Let me atone,” he begged. “Dead beyond awakening is my heart, and you know it. Do not now add a hideous insult to Nature to your cowardly abandonment of the past.” The dull, level coldness of her voice proved to him that she bore a frozen heart, one never to awaken at his touch. He cast himself down before her in a last appeal. And then, on his knees before the woman whom he had sworn to cherish “till death do us part,” the strong man pleaded for the child whom fate had robbed from the clinging arms of its mother. Margaret Cranstoun sobbed: “_The child!_ Oh, my God! _Never!_ Name not her name. Me, your victim or your sacrifice. Her name shall never cross your lips. Wherever God’s mercy takes that innocent one, she shall live and die fatherless—save for Him above. I swear it, on the memory of a mother’s natal anguish. And _now_, Senator James Garston,—” The stately woman stood before him with the menace of a life in her eyes. “_This is the end of all!_ Go! You are safe from my vengeance now. I care not how you have dragged yourself up on Fortune’s wheel. “Go! And if you ever break the sorrow-shaded stillness of my life, then, may God help you. For I will strike you down for the sake of that same fatherless child.” A black storm of suddenly aroused jealousy swept over Garston’s face. “Your handsome lover Vreeland shall be my prey, my tool, my confidant. I will creep into your heart through your own pleasant vice. And, by God! _He shall find out the girl for me._” When James Garston’s passion-blinded eyes cleared, he was standing there alone, and a sudden fear smote upon him. The ghastly silence of the splendid deserted halls weighed upon him. He staggered out into the blinding snows, now falling, and crossed the park to where a sleigh waited at the garden gate. He was half mad, as he wandered away under the trees, and he hurled away his revolver lest he should be tempted to die there before her windows. “I have lost a woman upon whose breast a king’s head might proudly rest,” he said to that ghost of his dead self which rose up to mock the man of mark, the millionaire. “And—_she loved me once_. Fool—_fool_—and—_blind fool!_” he muttered. A mad resolve thrilled him now. “The child! By God! _she would hide her. The world is not wide enough._ There’s my money—and this young fellow Vreeland. I have a lure for him.” His busy brain thrilled with plots of the one revenge left to him. “I will steal away both child and lover!” he swore.