"The move to town alarmed me. There, in business, she might run across the man who was her father—and this is exactly what happened. You’ve seen my daughter—you know what she is. Looking at me now you may not realize that she is extraordinarily like what I was when Johnston Barker married me. "He saw her first in the elevator at the Black Eagle Building. Men always noticed her—she was used to it—but that night she told me laughing of the old man who had stared at her in the elevator, stared and stared and couldn’t take his eyes off. My heart warned me, and when I heard her description I knew who he was and why he stared. "After that there was no peace for me. I had a haunting terror that he would find out who she was and might try to claim her. This increased when she told me of his visit to her office to buy the lot—an excuse I understood—and his questions about her former home. Then I tried to quiet myself with the assurances that he could not possibly guess—he had never heard the name of Whitehall in connection with me, he had never known a child was expected. "But a night came when I was put with my back against the wall. She returned from work, gay and excited, saying Mr. Barker had been in the office that afternoon and asked her if he might call and meet her mother. The terrible agitation that threw me into betrayed me. I couldn’t evade her eyes or her questions, and I told her. She was horrified, stunned. I can’t tell you what she said—I can only make you understand her feelings by saying she loved me as few daughters love their mothers. "After that—ah, it was horrible! She tried to cancel the sale, but he—of course, he was angry and puzzled by the change in her, could make nothing out of it, and finally insisted on knowing what had happened. There was no escape for her and taking him into the private office they had an interview in which he forced the truth from her. "Johnston Barker’s life has been full of great things, triumphs and conquests. But I think that hour in the Azalea Woods Estates office must have been the crowning one of his career. To hear that Carol, my wonderful Carol, was his child! He had had no suspicion of it until then. He told her he had been interested by her strange likeness to me, had thought she might be some distant connection, who could give him news of his lost wife.