“But I did not relinquish my resolve. Deliberately investing a hundred thousand dollars in Government bonds, I put them aside for her. They were to be no longer mine. I gave them to her and to her heirs as completely and irrevocably, I believed, as if I had laid them in her hand and seen her depart with them. I even inserted them as a legacy to her in my will. It was a clear and definite arrangement between me and my own soul; and after I had made it and given orders to my lawyer in Grotewell to acquaint me if he ever received the least news of Jacqueline Japha, I slept in peace. “Of the years that followed I have small need to speak. They were the years that preceded your coming, my Paula, and their story is best told by what I was when we met again, and you made me know the sweet things of life by entering into my home. Woman as a thoughtful, tender, elevated being had been so long unknown to me! The beauty of the feminine soul with its faith fixed upon high ideals, was one before which I had ever been ready to bow. All that I had missed in my youth, all that had failed me in my maturing manhood, seemed to flow back upon me like a river. I bathed in the sunshine of your pure spirit and imagined that the evil days were over and peace come at last. “A rude and bitter shock awoke me. Ona’s father, who had followed us to New York, and of whose somewhat checkered career during the past few years, I have purposely forborne to speak, had not been above appealing to us for assistance at such times as his frequently unfortunate investments left him in a state of necessity. These appeals were usually made to Ona, and in a quiet way; but one day he met me on the street—it was during the second winter you spent in my home—and dragging me into a restaurant down town, began a long tale, to the effect that he wanted a few thousands from me to put into a certain investment, which if somewhat shady in its character, was very promising as to its results; and gave as a reason why he applied to me for the money, that he knew I had not been above doing a wrongful act once, in order to compass my ends, and therefore would not be liable to hesitate now.