Likewise there was the Carlysle woman. Great, fine, much-to-be-desired romance had come into Johnathan’s life at last. And if he married her, still more emphatically than ever he could not go home. He would be guilty of bigamy, and the authorities in the States—who could never appreciate what a hard time Johnathan had endured through twenty-five hectic years—had very strict ideas about bigamy. And some day Mrs. Johnathan Forge, _née_ Carlysle, might want to go home. Then how could he explain? What could he do? Johnathan sighed and sloughed down in his chair. After all these years, happiness was within his grasp and he could not grasp it. The world was very hard. Hard! Hard! Hard! There were other crosses in it, after all, besides Nathan. II Nathan went up to the desk and the Yates Hotel in Syracuse and asked for his key and his mail. He received a postcard from Milly—asking him to send her money—a telephone and a gas bill which had been forwarded for payment, a letter from young Ted Thorne, his sales manager, and a long narrow envelope with a queer stamp. Nathan was puzzled by that stamp. It was a ten-sen stamp. What foreign country had sen among their coinage and who should be writing him from one of them? He slit the envelope at the cigar counter while the clerk waited for him to select his smokes from a proffered handful. Then a queer, hard surprise smote him as he read: Yokohama, Japan, August 2, 1916. Nathaniel Forge, Paris, Vt., U. S. A. Dear Sir: I write to you from a foreign land, afar from home, and an exile from all I hold most dear. My life almost wrecked by a brainless woman and thankless, unnatural children, here I sit in the forty-eighth year of my age, trying not to see the awful past, only to pierce the unknown future, and give you one last chance to redeem yourself and call down upon your head your father’s blessing. You are perfectly aware, Nathaniel, of what my domestic life was, for twenty-five fearful years. You, grown now to man’s estate, realize that your father showed the mettle and stamina to endure blindly for conscience’ sake and from his sense of great, grim duty. If your rattle-brained marriage has turned out happily, you know what your devoted father missed. If it has turned out unhappily (for which you have no one to blame but yourself!) you are tasting the fruits of all the wormwood and aloes that was my potion since the first day I looked upon your baby face and hugged you to my bosom with a father’s pride. In either case, you should be in a position to sympathize with me and at last pay your great debt to me by exerting yourself there at home in a trifling matter in my behalf.