In fact, some of the drafts of the future masterpiece, and the usual personal contents of a rich man’s pocketbook were the only papers found in the rooms. There was not even the foundation stone of a mystery. The checks, railway passes, club cards, etc., were not accompanied by a single family paper. It was “justly remarked by all that the country had sustained a great loss in the counsels of so distinguished and successful a Western money magnate as James Garston,” etc., in the usual vein. Alynton glanced over the platitudes as to being “cut off in his prime,” the usual references, _de rigueur_, to the “zenith of his powers,” and his being a man of “an already national reputation”—the lightly tossed journalistic wreath of immortelles! One or two daring writers had timidly referred to the long fight which had raised the deceased from a working Western low-grade lawyer in a mining town to a money power in the financial centers of the East and West. “That no immediate family falls heir to the honorable record of the departed is an element of sadness crowning a lonely career, embittered by many hard struggles with fate.” Such perfunctory phrases covered the gap between the unknown past of the “man who had arrived” and the lonely splendor of his final elevation. After Alynton had satisfied himself that Mr. Haygood Apchurch knew nothing whatever of Garston’s past, the distinguished member of the secret syndicate drove rapidly down to Judge Hiram Endicott’s office. His mind was now agitated with fears of the future of the sugar speculating syndicate of a “few friends.” In his feverish haste to make the living safe he had already forgotten the unloved dead man. He had not disturbed the silent grief of the repentant woman who bent over the pale silent lips now sealed in death. The eyes were sightless now which had thrilled their unspoken messages into her very soul. And the stormy heart of James Garston was as cold and pulseless as the marble wherein the tenantless shell would soon lie in the long rest. Suddenly Katharine Vreeland threw up her arms and fell at the feet of her woman friend, wildly sobbing— “There lies the only heart in God’s world that ever beat for me!” “Ah! Some one loved him after all,” mused the Trust Company’s financial representative. “She deserves her good fortune. I wonder does she know of the other one?” His mind was busied with curious conjectures as to the source of the dead man’s generosity. But the gates of the past were swung forever. The trembling heart of the “Western heiress” held a secret that was now sealed behind the mask of Garston’s waxen face. For the strong man, loyal in his darling sin, was true as steel to the last, and the hidden crime of two lives “left no dark plume as a token.”