And then his face softened. “Not yet! Not yet!” he murmured. “I shall live to look upon my child’s face.” And so, he had honestly cast up the accounts of his life, not sparing himself. He knew that Elaine Willoughby was now surrounded by an alert body-guard of detectives; that her volunteer guardians were with her daily. Either Judge Endicott, his nephew or the grave-faced Hugh Conyers was always an inmate of Lakemere on every visit she made to that lonely spot, and his own detectives had warned him that a special policeman was also an inmate of her household, while Roundsman Dan Daly was a grand outside guard. He dared not approach her. Could he lure her to his side? Ignorant of his wife’s secret warfare with Harold Vreeland, Senator Garston saw in all these precautions only the confirmation of her stern sentence of banishment from her presence. He knew, too, now of the practical victory of her trip around the world. Elaine Willoughby had made her word good. The missing girl had simply disappeared! And he had been unable to reach the girl in order to blacken the mother. He was powerless now. All his craft, backed by money, had been met and vanquished. When he had paid off all his detectives in a sullen despair, the Chief of the “Inquiry Bureau” had admiringly remarked: “Your enemy has certainly handled herself superbly, Senator.” “Force is of no use. She has been guided by some matchless intellect. We easily traced the girl over to Dresden. “There she became an inmate of a private Klinik, which, bowered in gardens and surrounded with stone walls, is guarded like the Kaiser’s palace. “Fortified by the stern German laws, the Doctor in charge would be able to resist anything but a criminal warrant. He owns the property used by the Klinik. And so far as we know the two women have never met. Mrs. Willoughby turned up first in Vienna, but we lost her at Port Said. God knows where she was in those two months. “The girl went into the Klinik and never emerged; that is our final report. You know what your orders were—no scandal, no publicity. We tried to get an agent into the establishment. Ah! Useless! It is a close corporation.” The Senator on this lonely night was happy that he had only divulged to his agents his desire to find the girl for reasons of an old, bitter intrigue about her property interests. Too well he knew that Margaret Cranstoun’s clear voice, if once lifted to tell the story of his past, would damn him forever. The toga would then be but a public badge of shame. And so, fear stayed his strong hand. And a hundred vain solutions of the enigma had haunted his fancy, for he himself felt assured that the women had met in Europe, and that his daughter was now lost to him forever. He groaned as he pondered over the sweet face smiling up from the dearly bought picture. His sentence of a living death weighed heavily upon him now. The daughter whom he yearned for would perhaps never call him “Father!”