Page was folding this letter into its envelope, when a telegraph boy entered the office. "Want an answer?" he asked. "Yes, sir." So while his clerk signed, the lawyer tore open the message. He started as he read it, and a slow color rose over his face. Taking a blank he scribbled an address, then added:— Will be with you to-morrow evening. GORHAM PAGE. Making hasty preparations at the office and at home, he barely succeeded in catching the limited train for Chicago. When he was seated in his section, he drew forth from his pocket the telegram that had startled him, and read it again. Mr. Van Tassel died suddenly at nine last night. Can you come to us? MILDRED BRYANT. "Poor Jack!" thought Page; and the wheels seemed to repeat the words like a refrain. He disliked his own task, but it did not seem strange to him that he had been summoned. Mr. Van Tassel had no near relatives in Chicago. Page had had charge of his legal affairs in Boston. Doubtless his address had been among the dead man’s papers, and Mrs. Van Tassel’s advisers had suggested that he be sent for. Page shrank repugnantly from encountering this woman, whom disaster followed so relentlessly. He tried not to think of her. Perhaps it would not be necessary that they should meet at all; yet try as he might, he could not prevent his imagination from picturing the siren, who had succeeded in capturing the honest, cordial, fine-natured man, whose death it was difficult to realize. How would Jack bear it? How would his highly strung affectionate nature stand the strain? This woman who had brazenly told him that she did not love his father had been the one to stand near the latter’s deathbed; while the loving heart of the son had been kept at a distance by her machinations. For Page was now fully convinced that Jack had been deliberately deceived as to his father’s condition, and he blamed himself hotly for obeying his sister and refraining from intermeddling. He said to himself that he ought to have talked with Miss Bryant about the matter at R——. The thought of Mildred gave him no pleasure. She was sister to the woman who had robbed Jack, and broken his heart. He felt a sudden conviction of Mrs. Van Tassel’s appearance. She was an Amazon; tall, commanding, bold-faced, loud-voiced, with a coarser repetition of her sister’s beauty; and involuntarily he shuddered with anticipatory disgust, and wished the next few days well over. But this was being extraordinarily imaginative for Page, and he realized it all at once, and opened the paper which he had bought, with the newsboy shuffling along beside him as he hastened through the depot in Boston. But his thoughts would not concentrate upon the printed page; rather they flew to Jack’s brilliant face,—the face which always said that life was good,—and saw it suddenly stamped with white despair, alone in a strange land.