When she lectured at Lexington her father came in secret--for she had written to him pleading with him not to do so--to hear his wonderful daughter, whom even he himself had never quite understood. And when, toward the close of the lecture, the sound of quiet sobs rose from the back of the audience, there was a dramatic moment when the woman on the platform stopped speaking and caught hurriedly at the little table beside her for support. It was in her own State, too, that she delivered her much-talked-of address on Motherhood before the Four-O'clock Club--an address which later appeared in a tiny _édition de luxe_, and was looked on by certain of her admirers as the most tender and most human utterance of all her career. There appeared but one small cloud on the horizon of all that open success, remarkable for the unexpected strangeness of its appearance, and notable because of the equal abruptness of its passing. It was during the dull and quiescent days following the alleviatingly active weeks of the lecture tour. Cordelia felt that she would go mad if she remained longer with nothing to take up her mind. Her restless feet had worn a dull pathway in the pile of the over-gaudy carpet that ornamented her soberly magnificent apartment-hotel. In despair, she turned once more to literature, and once more alone and most bitterly she struggled to wrest from a reluctant Muse some solitary bay-leaf of her own, some final shred of laurel to which no other hand might lay claim, aspiring to climb once more to the pinnacle of that most delectable mountain about whose dangerous fringe she had now fretted for many months. It was a courageous struggle. But it proved a futile one. Then casting desperately about her, in a new-born terror of helplessness, hidden away on the obscure shelf of an obscure library she stumbled across a badly bound, age-yellowed little volume which bore the title The Spirit Child. It had been conceived and written by one Florence Hitch, of Boston, and dedicated to "all seekers after Truth and the Spirit." Could there be, Cordelia asked herself, another such book so obviously dead and forgotten!