It was at the end of a brief visit to Cincinnati that Ethan's strongest temptation assailed him. It came in the commonplace form of a photograph in a forwarded letter from Val. Partly the picture, but, even more, something of the girl's eager spirit that had got between the lines of the letter, something unsaid, yet eloquent, of her unexpected power of holding out, took sudden hold on him, made his nerves tingle as if by a bodily contact. There she was, vivid as she had been for so many yesterdays, to-day triumphant, irresistible. He must go--he must go to her! He had been attempting more than he had strength to carry through. He flung some things into a valise and went down to the station. Train just gone--another in an hour and ten minutes. He got his ticket and bought papers and magazines. In the _Enquirer_ the report of an address before the Medical Congress caught his eye. The famous Dr. Gage had been haranguing his colleagues upon the supposed deterioration of the American race, because the birth-rate among the well-to-do classes was lamentably low, the reason being that more and more the women of these classes shrank from motherhood. In the course of his address Dr. Gage made a passing reference to his forthcoming work on _Consanguineous Marriage_. In the next column, among the hotel arrivals, it appeared that the great doctor was registered at the Burnet House. Ethan took out his watch. "Why not? There's time." He jumped into the nearest carriage and drove to the hotel. In something over an hour he returned, gave up his New Plymouth ticket, and got one for the afternoon express to New York. Nobody at the Fort ever knew how near Ethan had been to taking them by surprise. The Otways always went away in the hot weather. The summer that Val was twenty-two, Julia and her family went to the Jersey coast for their holiday. There, at Long Branch, they found Ethan. Both he and Julia mentioned the fact in their letters, and Val tried to think the meetings as casual and unimportant as they looked on paper; but it was the hardest summer she had known. Besides the fact that Julia was enjoying opportunities of seeing Ethan denied to Val, there was matter in her letters even more disturbing--references to Mr. Gano's constant appearance in the train of a young and wealthy widow who had a house at Long Branch. This lady, Julia wrote, was known to have been one of a party Mr. Gano had taken yachting before coming to Long Branch. Val had heard about that party from her cousin, but no mention of Mrs. Suydam. The lady was much in Val's thoughts. At last, upon an exasperated reference in one of Julia's letters to Mr. Gano's "Circe," Val wrote to him: "Tell me something about this Mrs. Suydam, whom you have never once mentioned, although you see so much of her."