Unconscious of the incongruous prayer which had fallen from his lips, he turned into the drawing-room, on the left of the hall, and sank into an easy-chair, covering his face with his stiff hands. Suddenly he heard a light step on the veranda, and, raising his eyes, he saw Dora standing in the hall, glancing wildly and excitedly about her. Possessed by the fear that she might call out, and thus make her presence known at that most crucial moment, he rose and hastened to her. She did not see him till he was close at her side, and then she turned and their eyes met. “Where is Lionel--where is my child?” she panted. He stood staring at her, unable to formulate a reply, and, brushing past him with an air of contempt, which he read all too clearly, she turned to the stairs, and started to ascend. “Oh, you mustn't--you really mustn't!” he called out in protest, and he put a detaining hand on her arm. Shrinking from his touch, she stared at him piteously. “Then they really are doing it!” she cried. “They are up there operating on my child! I knew it when Doctor Beaman drove up, and Doctor Wynn came and asked Lionel to play over here.” Galt made no denial. He stood beside her, swept out of himself by the sheer power of her astounding beauty, as he now beheld it for the first time since their parting. In his wildest stretch of fancy as to what the years might have brought her, he had not dreamed that she had become such a flower among women. There was a seductive maturity of intellect in her faultless face. The strange, appealing, and yet unreadable lights of genius were burning in her dark, mystic eyes. He stood before her with the smitten humility, the cringing shame, of a subject rebuked by his queen. “Yes, I am sure of it!” she moaned, and she lowered her glorious head to the newel of the stairs and shuddered. “They are cutting my darling, and I can't go to him. Doctor Wynn thought he'd spare my feelings--as if that counted.” She suddenly looked him squarely in the face, and he shrank before the calm penetration of her stare. “We'll never see him alive again,” she said, in a low, husky voice--“never again on earth!” “Oh no, don't say that!” he cried, finding his submerged voice in the agony produced by her suggestion. “God wouldn't be so unmerciful--the child has harmed no one!”