The child complied, timidly, a delicate flush of appreciation on his mobile face. Then she put him down, and, still not looking at Galt, she said: “No, you needn't come, Lionel; I'll only be there a minute to return the letter. You may stay here and entertain your--your good friend.” Galt, who had risen, stood looking after her for a moment, his countenance dark with the ever-constant despair within him. He felt the tiny, confident hands of his child as they pressed against his legs, and looked down into the sweetly smiling, upturned face. “They _all_ like me now,” Lionel said. “She was the only one that didn't, but she says she does _now_. She kissed me. Did you see her? Oh, she's so pretty! She is--no, she isn't, but she is _nearly_ as pretty as my mother.” Galt sat down and drew the boy first to a seat on his knee and then into his arms. “She knows the truth,” he said to himself, in a tone of desperate indifference to fate. “Something in that letter told her.” CHAPTER XXI |AS she passed through the gate at the end of the lawn, Margaret looked back and saw the child and its father seated together. “Yes, he is the one,” she mused. “He of all men! And yet I might have known it; he has adored the child since the moment he first saw it there on the lawn.” Dora saw her coming from her easel near the window of her studio, and stood in the hall awaiting her. Her face was aglow with expectation. Without any word of greeting Margaret simply ran to her and threw her arms about her neck. “Oh, you are _so_ good, _so_ noble!” she cried. “I see it all now, and I have been wofully wrong. Oh, Dora, I could not have treated you as I have all these miserable years if I had not thought--I actually thought--” “I know now what you thought,” Dora broke in, a pained expression clutching her lips, as she drew Margaret into the studio. “I don't know why I did not think of it sooner, but I didn't. Away back when my trouble was blackest I heard that Fred's name had been coupled with mine. I denied it then, and thought that was the end of it. After that, you see,” she went on, with a shudder of repugnance to the topic, “I buried myself here so completely that no outside gossip reached my ears. I had to guard my own secret, and I was afraid that even the slightest agitation of the matter might disclose the truth. I--I would have died rather than have had it known--all of it, I mean.” “And yet you sent me this letter?” Margaret laid it on a table and stood staring gratefully into the beautiful face. “You sent it, although you knew that it might--at least--lead me to--to wonder who--”