These words, clear, unmistakable, carrying their terrible truth straight to his heart, come to John Strebelow as the very first intimation that his wife did not love him when she married him. Crushed by this sudden blow, an expression of agony on his face, he stands for a moment speechless. When his voice returns, he has become another man. He is hard and cold, still generous, so far as those things a generous man cares least for are concerned. He will share all his wealth with her; but, in the awful bitterness of a great heart, at that moment, he feels that the woman who has deceived him so wickedly has no natural right to be the guardian of their child. "Return to our home, madam; it will be yours, not mine, hereafter; but our child will not be there." Ungenerous words! But if we are looking in our own hearts, where we must find nearly all the laws of dramatic construction, how many of us would be more generous, with such words as John Strebelow had just heard ringing in our ears? As the act closes, the startled love of a mother has again and finally asserted itself in Lilian's heart, its one overmastering passion of her nature. With the man she has loved lying near her, wounded, and, for aught she knows, dying, she is thinking only of her lost child. Maternal love, thruout the history of the world, has had triumphs over all the other passions; triumphs over destitution and trials and tortures; over all the temptations incident to life; triumphs to which no other impulse of the human heart--not even the love of man for woman--has ever risen. One of the most brilliant men I had ever known once said in court; "Woman, alone, shares with the Creator the privilege of communing with an unborn human being"; and, with this privilege, the Creator seems to have shared with woman a part of His own great love. All other love in our race is merely human. The play, from this time on, becomes the story of a mother's love.