“The book is a tissue of mysteries, quite apart from the ordinary usages, but solved in the end satisfactorily.”--_Chicago Tribune._ “One of those rare examples of literary composition the artistic excellence of which is uniform and even throughout.”--_Charleston News and Courier._ “There is color, vitality, and freshness in the picture, and charming variety of detail in the development of story. Horton is the ideal lover, strong-hearted, wilful, persevering; and Kate is the vivid, tantalizing, impersonal creature in an armor of secrecy. But the author transforms this woman into a being of rarest and most beautiful human qualities--or rather, brings those latent emotions to the fore. She is a woman racked by grief over death and unhappy marital experiences in youth, and, later, a woman ‘lied to, tortured, duped, and her heart polluted and desecrated’; and in giving up her beloved lawyer-friend, whom she would have married, to the ‘helpless, motherless, hampered’ child who so passionately claimed his love, Kate’s humanism stands out in almost supernatural power.”--_Boston Evening Transcript._ J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY PUBLISHERS PHILADELPHIA TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES: Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized. Archaic or variant spelling has been retained. New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.