Suddenly he thought of the boy!—Mary’s boy and his. He straightened himself up; there was still somebody left to do that for. For Mary’s sake he would devote himself to the boy; it was tremendously worth while. He sat down and painstakingly wrote a letter that made his own tears come and the boy’s when he read it, and drew the two together as nothing but sorrow and loneliness and love can ever do. It followed so naturally and plainly that if Mary wanted her son to be like his father, the father must try to be a better sort of chap. Remorse receded, and took with it the burden of hopelessness. CHAPTER XXVII “She was beautiful, and therefore to be wooed: She was a woman, and therefore to be won.” GLADYS went into the garden, where it was coolest and shadiest, and sat, a lovely and pathetic figure, leaning, it is true, against a cushion with her listless hands in her lap. So Captain Hurstly found her. She had written the little heart-broken note, and she rose to meet him with quivering lips. “Oh, Jack, Jack!” she murmured—in an abandonment of grief Christian names fall so naturally, and it sounded very sweet to Jack—“how good of you to come!” “Good of me?”—he held both her hands; she had given them to him unconsciously—“I think it was awfully sweet of you to see me—I’m so sorry, dear—so sorry!” The tears rolled down her cheeks. She looked very pretty when she cried, and it was very difficult not to kiss her. “Mary was everything I had in the world,” she said withdrawing her hands with a swift blush, and sinking back on the cushions again—“mother, sister, friend. And Tom—Tom has been so brutal to me Oh, what shall I do, what shall I do!” “Tom brutal to you?” “Yes! he hates me. I’m sure I don’t know why. Perhaps he feels now he might have done more for Mary. She told me often how terribly lonely she was before I came to her. We are to go back to England next week, and I know too well what that means!” “What does it mean?” he asked looking at her long and carefully, the white dress that fell away from the little fair throat, the pathetic quiver of the dainty mouth, the hopeless, hunted look in the big dark eyes. “Oh, I can’t tell you!” she cried with a sudden gasp. “Don’t—don’t ask me!” “I must know,” he said firmly; “tell me, please.” The color swept over her cheeks, her eyes faltered and fell before his, her hands trembled in her lap. “Tom wants me to marry,” she said at last, “a man I can never—love.” She covered her face with her hands. “Go away!” she cried piteously. “Isn’t it hard enough already without making me tell—you!” She gasped the word containing her passionate heart. She was in earnest now, that was why she hid her face; she knew that she would not be so pretty.