'It was only after your father's death that I saw a way of escape out of the intolerable position in which I had placed myself. I was in very bad health for a time, and my husband's affection for the alien child was more than I was able to bear. There is always a touch of the savage in motherhood, and I am naturally jealous. 'After my husband's death I went out to my own property in Spain, and by judiciously moving about there from one place to another, and changing my personal servants frequently, it was a comparatively easy matter to say that the child had died, without exactly specifying where his death had taken place. 'It was absolutely necessary that he should be got rid of. A pauper emigrant's boy was taking the place of my son in everything. The very tenants about the place treated him differently from the way in which they treated you. My husband had decided that the bilk of his property was to go to him; and all the time I knew that his father was from the class from which perhaps, navvies are drawn, and that his mother was some girl from Whitechapel or Mile End. 'He had to go, but I treated him fairly. I took him down to Lisbon myself and sent him back to his father with a trustworthy couple who were going out there. From my own private fortune I bestowed upon him a sum sufficient to educate him and to place him in the world. 'I think I never breathed freely or had one undisturbed moment from the time you were born until he had gone to Argentine. 'The people to whom I entrusted him both died of fever in Rosario, and from that day to this I have never heard of the boy who was called Edward Ogilvie. The money which I had bestowed upon him had proved too tempting to some one. The child disappeared, and so far as I am concerned he was never heard of again. 'For four years he had lived as my own son, and it was I who took him away from his father and his natural surroundings. I want you to find him if you can. If he has been brought up vilely or treated brutally by strangers, the fault, of course, lies with me; this will probably distress you, but I think it will be an incentive also to you to try to find the man.' The letter was signed in Mrs. Ogilvie's name and it finished as abruptly as it had begun. * * * * * The first thing that roused Peter from the sense of bewilderment and almost of stupor which beset him was Dunbar's arrival at the estancia. 'Purvis has given us the slip again!' said the detective. 'The man has as many lives is he has names! He has disappeared more than once before, and he has even died, to my certain knowledge, two or three times, in order to get out of a tight place.' 'Oh, Purvis, yes!' said Peter absently; and then he pulled himself together and briefly told Dunbar the whole story. 'It doesn't alter the fact,' said Dunbar, 'that I have got to find him if I can.'