"Tell me everything that happened that day, every visitor you had; don't omit the most trifling thing," he commanded. He listened attentively as I recalled Harry Underwood's visit, and Robert Gordon's. At my revelation that Robert Gordon had said he was my father, his calm, judicial manner broke into excitement. "Your father!" he exclaimed, and then, after a pause; "I always knew he would come back some day. But go on. What happened when he told you he was your father?" I went on with the story of my struggle with my own rancor against my father, of my conviction that I had heard my mother's voice urging my reconciliation with him, of my father's first embrace and kisses, even of the queer smothered sound like a groan and the slamming of a door which I had heard. Then I told him of my father's gift of money to me, which I had not yet touched, but I noticed that toward the last of my narrative Jack seemed preoccupied. "Did your husband come home to Marvin at all that day?" he asked. "No, he never came back from the city after he had once gone in, until evening." "But are you sure that this day he did not return to Marvin?" he persisted. "How do you know?" "Because no one saw him," I returned, "and he could hardly have come back without someone in the house seeing him." He said no more, as Lillian and Katherine came up just then, and the conversation became general. To my great surprise, I did not see him again after that first visit. Katherine explained to me that he had been called out of town on urgent business, but the explanation seemed to me to savor of the mysterious excitement that seemed to possess everybody around me. Finally one morning, Lillian came to me, her face shining. "I want you to prepare to be very brave, Madge," she said. "There is some one coming whom I fear it will tax all your strength to meet." "Dicky!" I faltered, beginning to tremble. "No, child, not yet," she said, her voice filled with pity, "but someone who has done you a great wrong, Grace Draper." XLIII "TAKE ME HOME" "Grace Draper coming to see me!" My echo of Lillian's words was but a trembling stammer. The prospect of facing the girl the thread of whose sinister personality had so marred the fabric of my marital happiness terrified me. Her message to me, posted in San Francisco, where Dicky was, flaunted its insolent triumph again before my eyes: "She laughs best who laughs last." That she had intended me to believe she was with Dicky, I knew, whether her boast were true or not. But how was it that she was coming to see me? Lillian put a reassuring hand upon my shoulder as she saw my face. "Pull yourself together, Madge," she admonished me sharply. "Let me make this clear to you. Grace Draper is not in San Francisco now. Whether she has been, or what she knows about Dicky she has refused so far to say. She has finally consented to see you, however." "But, how?" I murmured, bewildered.