I am inclined to believe that each one of my fair readers, and a majority of those mere males of less account, would gladly accompany me in my journey south by east across the map of Europe. I say this, not by reason of over-weening pride in my personal charm as a _compagnon de voyage_, but because of the journey’s objective. At the present stage of my story, Maggie Hutchinson is surely an interesting personage. Have you ever heard or read of another heroine so situated? Mark you, she knew Karl when she was a little child. After ten years’ separation she met him, under very peculiar conditions, for a few hours in a London hotel. And now, five years later, without ever a word exchanged between them during all that long time, her life was indissolubly bound up with his, a passionate love united her to him with ties never dreamed of by tender Juliet or devoted Héloïse, and to crown the midsummer madness of it all, Karl was deliberately killing himself to save another woman’s life. It is a pardonable assumption, therefore, that every true devotee of romance should be eager to meet her face to face. I know that I was. I quitted Charing Cross in a state of nervous exaltation to which my seasoned heart had long been a stranger. But Fate, the master playwright, had ordained that influences I had not foreseen should fill the stage for many an hour ere I reached the Castello Rondo in far-off Italy. In fact, none of us had taken into account Karl’s mother. Mrs. Grier was not enamored of high society as it is understood in London. She was a German, and she had never lost her Teuton’s tastes. First, and necessarily, a good housekeeper, she gave her spare time to reading. She hardly ever glanced at a newspaper, nor did she dawdle through more than one novel a year. She kept her household accounts, contrived economies in an annual expenditure of many thousands, looked after the practical management of certain estates, and, for the rest, saw as little as possible of fashionable folk, but isolated herself with some portentous professorial treatise on the more serious matters of life, or sought relaxation in the pages of her beloved Schiller. This was excellent while Grier senior was accumulating riches, and Karl followed the beaten track leading to a suitable marriage and a peerage. But she had lost none of her maternal love for her wonderful son, and her shrewd eyes soon divined the anxiety of her husband, the silent endurance of Karl. At first, her questions encountered a certain gentle evasiveness. She persisted, and the elder Grier admitted that all was not well between Karl and Nora. Then the mother entered the arena, and you need never ask in whose behalf she drew the sword. “If Karl does not want to marry Nora Cazenove, why are you trying to force him into a distasteful match?” she demanded of her distressed partner. “I am doing nothing of the kind,” was the instant answer. “Then who _is_ doing it?”