“Do not ask me yet, my darling!” she sobbed. “I want you all to myself now. Ask me nothing yet.” And though the Lady of Lakemere had hoodwinked all of Garston’s spies, though she had returned unanswered, the letters from her husband sent to her by messenger on her return, and held the secret of his guilty past over his head, she felt that this armed inactivity could not continue forever. The battle must be fought out, and either lost or won. She renewed her courage. She could not lie to her child, and her eyes had dropped before the appealing glances of the restored one. A hundred varied plans were considered on that long ocean return voyage. Too well she knew that she dared not settle down in Europe and leave Harold Vreeland’s unpunished crime behind her. The secret hidden in the stolen document was momentous! She could not abandon her comrades in their speculations without vindicating her trust in honor. An option, under the guarantee of her faithful syndicate friends to allow “certain persons” to purchase “certain stocks” at a fixed valuation was in that fateful record. Its loss meant the ruin of many reputations. Perhaps, too, the crash of vast fortunes. The betrayal of a trust which Alynton had imposed upon her, and for which she had been selected by the “secret syndicate”—the gods of local finance! She must leave the secret circle with clean hands. So far, she was safe! As yet, the thief had not dared to use it. Its fatal power was still veiled from her dearest foe, James Garston, the husband of her youthful flower, whom all men once honored as Arnold Cranstoun. “My God!” shuddered Elaine. “If Garston should obtain that document it would be my ruin. All would believe that I had sold their secrets to others. I would be at his mercy. It must not be. “If he—Vreeland—can be trapped, if a silent surrender is safely effected, then I could give up my trust, leave America, and seek happiness abroad with Romaine, my beautiful darling.” But though she knew that Harold Vreeland would dare to make no public use of the document, though she was positive that fear of political scandal would seal James Garston’s lips, she dared not deny, in her lone watches under the stars, that the man whom she had banished was still her husband—“till death do us part.” And if Vreeland was the thief, he could sell her to shame in all men’s eyes if Garston would shield him. She knew further that there was no mercy in Garston’s love-maddened heart now! And a bitter thought haunted her over the dark Atlantic waters. “My child’s future! She can not marry under the suspicion of illegitimate birth, and she shall never deem her mother to have been a guilty wanton.” Even Judge Endicott and the chivalric Hugh Conyers knew but half the truth. Both had assumed that there had been an early and unhappy marriage, and both only believed that Elaine Willoughby was merely fighting for the custody of a child whom they knew not to be of legal age.