Brought to bay by the wild appeal, the excited woman realized that she dare not confer with either Alynton, Endicott or Conyers. The still unsoiled woman-heart revolted at the unveiling of all the sorrows of a shadowed life—those secret sorrows which had haunted her in all the gilded scenes of a strange prosperity, her burden carried under the veil of secrecy—her galling chain of secret sorrows. “For the child’s sake!” she murmured, as she vainly essayed to answer her recreant husband’s proposals. A dozen times she had read over his last logical conclusion: “If you and I are to respect the untroubled heart of the innocent child whom I have never seen, then we must leave it to her alone to decide in the future as to whether she shall go on through life as a fatherless girl. “You might be taken away; I might pay the penalty of nature. What would become of our child then? Can you answer? And even if I am a husband no longer, you have no power to decree that I am not a father. And you and I alone can settle a situation leading on to madness or despair. As for the spoliation of our daughter, I will prevent that, but is that all?—answer me, for God’s sake—is that all of life?—the mere money provision? Dare you say it is?” Elaine Willoughby recognized at once his coldly practical mind in the propositions. “For all our sakes,” he pleaded, “I will die to the world as Arnold Cranstoun, if you agree; and I swear before God, that if you agree that I will only approach Romaine Garland as a stranger, unless in later years you may lift the ban. For never lived man or woman who could foretell the future workings of the chainless human heart. Let us make some joint provision for her future safety. In God’s name—for the child’s sake.” His words echoed in her heart, and not in vain. A meeting at the Hotel Belgravia in a week’s time was the proposal. A family friend of Senator Garston’s had placed his apartments at the husband’s disposal. “We are neither of us known there; you can previously enter the hotel and observe the rooms. “In the evening at nine o’clock on the day you select, I will be at the door, and you can close the sorrows of a whole life, in a half-hour given up to mercy.” “For the child’s sake, be it so!” she cried as she read over the proposal once more. Her task was to bring every letter and relic of their married days and to witness their destruction. “Then our child can never be shadowed by my guilty past,” his hand had traced. “I am sure of your silence. I will go on undisgraced to the end of my career. I will cease to pursue you and her. “I am to give you the receipt of the International Trust Company for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars of United States bonds, registered in the name of Romaine Garland. “And I am to leave her in my will one-half of all my property. There is then to be silence—oblivion; for me repentance, for you peace, and so, for her in time, the enjoyment of her own.