“By Heavens!” he cried, in his anguish. “Margaret may have the power to hold herself aloof from me. I have lost all my rights to her. There is the past to face. She is right as to herself, but, the child! Nature’s laws, the laws of God and man, give me the right to a hearing. It is for my child alone to forgive or to condemn her father. And, I could atone! She could have all—an honored name, a solid fortune, and a repentant man’s blessing. ‘Only to hear her voice, only to see her face,’” and he broke into bitter sobs. For he dared not deceive his hungry heart. He was wretched, lonely and repentant. The wretched man little knew how ably Roper had fulfilled his trust as personal guard, how wisely Sara Conyers had concerted her measures. Secretly smuggled away at night from the Dresden Klinik, Romaine Garland had been transported to Copenhagen in a private car, and, on beautiful Lake Malar, near stately Stockholm, an old chateau, now a secluded sanitarium, had given its welcome shelter to the three travelers. Judge Endicott’s all-seeing eye followed their every movement, and Roper had nobly upheld his trust. The heart-hungry mother, hastening from Port Said to Odessa, and thence to St. Petersburg, had crossed the Baltic to Stockholm, and then, while the baffled detectives were still watching in Dresden, had clasped to her heart the girl whom the lame secretary’s chance affection had given back to her. And what a delicious apprenticeship in motherhood was opened to the loving woman! A fairy heaven! There, by the blue waves of Lake Malar, the mother learned of Alva Whiting’s peaceful girlhood days in western New York. How those who had given her a home had died leaving her their honest name and a legacy of love in the technical education which had fitted her to gain a living. And then, came the ordeal! The pathway of a maidenly Una among the lions and jackals of Greater New York City. And in God’s mystic providence, the strange path which had led her to the temptations of the great restless city was made only a return to the bosom of the woman who had lost her child in the shifting of the mock philanthropic “Home.” And how fondly the happy mother clung to her wonderfully restored lost lamb! The dark shadows which rested on the heart of the repentant husband threw their gloomy shade now over the heart-happy mother. For the same fear possessed them both. The old fear! That puerile fear—and yet, the most potent: What will the world say? Garston feared the black record of his cowardly abandonment, and the victorious mother found that, though innocent, she dared not tell the whole truth. Innocent at heart, realizing the only means to save her child from the man whom she secretly feared, when Elaine Willoughby went back, incognito, to reappear at Vienna on her homeward way, she only caught her loving child to her breast in a torrent of silent tears, when Romaine Garland murmured: “You never speak of my father!”