“Should she learn from you in later years that James Garston was her father, there will at least be no cloud upon her name, and I leave the key of the future in your hands. “This I would guarantee before either of the three men whom you trust; but, I implore peace and silence, for the child’s sake. “Our only guarantee in this interview of good faith is the one unbroken tie between us, the child whom I have never seen.” It was late in the day when James Garston read the lines traced by the hand which had once trembled lovingly in his own. “I will come! I will trust to you once more, under the protection of the memories of all my sorrows, but only for the child’s sake. Our past is dead. Let us place the seal of silence upon its tomb. I will do as you bid me.” There was a strange light in Senator Garston’s face as he hurried out of the Plaza Hotel, and when in the corridor, he met Harold Vreeland, he wrested himself from that desperate gamester’s clutches. He dared not break away from the haggard outcast. There was the meeting with Elaine—the one aim now of his awakened soul. “Come into the writing-room,” said the Senator, after he had heard an appeal which caused him to fear that the man’s mind was wavering. “Remember, sir,” sternly said the Western millionaire, “I know where the money is going. And it is the very last dollar of mine that you will ever see. Your wife”—Garston stopped, shamefaced, for the shadow of a darling sin now rose up between him and the new-born hope of meeting his own child in the coming years. The spell of Margaret Cranstoun was strong upon him now. “I can atone; Katharine shall not live to suffer poverty,” he groaned, as Vreeland sped away with a check for forty thousand dollars. And so, a manly throb of remorse made him generous to Katharine Norreys’ hoodwinked husband. The rain was falling in torrents when the hooded form of a stately woman descended at the Hotel Belgravia on a storm-darkened night a week later. The drenched cabman wondered at the hurried liberality of his fare, and then hastened away far beyond the row of blinking lights. Up the stairway to the first story, the visitor sped with no uncertain foot, the “parlor watch” noticing with surprise the white robes beneath the lady’s shrouding cloakings. For it was a fearful night without; those festal robes were but a mockery in the storm-lashed darkness. “One of our regulars caught out in this squall,” sleepily muttered the waiter, resuming his novel. Onward, guided by a surely retentive memory, the woman sped through the halls, and pressed her hand upon a doorknob which yielded to her touch. The door was quickly closed, and there, surrounded by all the belongings of a happy family circle, the long sundered foes met in silence before a cheerful fire which blazed upon the hearth.