“There were reasons,” she protested, gently withdrawing herself, but holding me for a minute to her side. “He has had great fortune--is a man of importance now--we did not wish to interfere with his career. It was only after the money was found that we felt he should come. We should not have asked him to take back his old name, we should simply have given him what he thought best to take and been so happy and proud to see him. He is so handsome and fortunate that we should not have begrudged it, if he had taken it all. But he struck me! he struck me! He will never get a dollar now.” Relieved, for the natural good sense of the woman was reasserting itself, I gave her hands a squeeze and quickly ran back to where the mayor was holding the door for me. “She is all right now,” I remarked, as I slid by him upstairs; and that was all I said. The rest must wait a more auspicious moment--the moment when he really would have time to take up the gage which Mr. Steele had thrown down to him in his final words. I was not a witness to the parting interview between Mayor Packard and his wife; I had stolen into the nursery, for a look at the little one. I found her sleeping sweetly, with one chubby hand under her rounded cheek. Thus had she lain and thus had she slept during all those dreadful minutes, when her future hung, trembling in the balance. CHAPTER XXVII. A CHILD’S PLAYTHINGS I was too much overwhelmed by all these events to close my eyes that night. The revelation of Mr. Steele’s further duplicity, coming so immediately upon the first, roused fresh surmises and awakened thoughts which soon set my wits working in a direction as new as it was unexpected. I had believed my work over in this house, but as I recalled all the occurrences of the evening and turned the situation, as it now confronted me, over and over in my mind, I felt that it had just begun. There must be something in this latest development to help us in the struggle which lay before us. The rage which sprang up in him as he confronted his old aunt at this moment of his triumphant revenge argued a weakness in his armor which it might yet be my part to discover and reveal. I knew Mrs. Packard well enough to realize that the serenity into which she had fallen was a fictitious serenity, and must remain so as long as any doubt remained of the legality of the tie uniting her to this handsome fiend. Were the means suggested by the mayor of promising enough character to accomplish the looked-for end?