"Richard," she wrote. "I have gone away from you. I have long felt that I had but a small share in your heart, and now I know that I have, perhaps, no right to your name, and no place in your home. So it is best that I should leave you. I have taken little Golden with me. There is one thing, at least, that I can do. I can be a mother to the child whose father has disowned her, and whose mother is so tragically lost. "You were wrong, Richard. The child has been wronged, but I believe that she is innocent. I have loved you more than you knew; perhaps more than you cared, and for your sake I will care for your forlorn child. You will not seek for us. We are companions in misery, and you will respect our grief. I cannot tell you where we shall go. But if you find little Golden's mother I shall know it, and the mother shall have her child." With the simple name, "Gertrude," the letter ended; Richard Leith reread it slowly, filled with a great surprise and wonder. "She will care for the child I treated so heartlessly," he murmured. "God bless her. I did not know that Gertrude could be so true and noble. I have wronged her indeed, and she has worn the mask of carelessness and frivolity over a wounded heart. Oh, God, if I only knew where to find them." He almost cursed himself for his cruelty to his wronged and miserable daughter. He remembered how young she was, and how ignorant of the world when Bertram Chesleigh had won her heart. Perhaps she was not to blame. His wrath waxed hot against the man who had betrayed her guileless innocence. He went down and asked the housekeeper if Mrs. Leith had gone away in the carriage, and she answered that the lady had walked, and the maid had accompanied her. "I cannot go south until I have found them," he said to himself, sadly. "Poor little Golden, poor Gertrude." Before the next day he had visited every depot and every wharf by which they might have left the city, but he had learned nothing. The next day after he inserted a personal in the _Herald_: "TO GERTRUDE:--Return with Golden. Her true story is known and she is freely forgiven. Anxiously, R. L." But the two for whom that yearning cry was written were fated never to behold it. And the dreary winter days came and went while he waited for tidings, filled with the heart-sickness of a great despair. CHAPTER XXXIX. While the winter snow still whirled in blinding drifts through the streets of New York, the sun shone, the flowers bloomed, the birds sang around old Glenalvan Hall in far-away Florida. Old Dinah crooned her quaint revival hymns in the sunny doorway of the kitchen, and her old master dozed in the bright, bay-window among the pots of fragrant flowers. It was February, and hints of the nearing spring were in the air that sighed softly among the flowers, and lifted the thin, white locks from the brow of old Hugh, as his weary head lay resting on the back of his easy-chair.