At her mother’s request she returned to her home in New York and there at last met again the Walter Prescott whose name had been in her blue book as her possible husband before she met Craig Mason. In some respects he was like Craig, undemonstrative, caring little for society and much for books. He had never forgotten Helen and soon fell again under her spell. He knew of her divorce and would rather it had not been, but her beauty conquered him and she became his wife and mistress of one of the finest establishments in New York. With Judge Prescott, whom she respected and feared, she lived very comfortably. He was not a man to tolerate any nonsense. His wife, like Caesar’s, must be above reproach, and from the first he was master of the situation. Helen was very fond of Fanny, who was as unlike her as it was possible for a child to be unlike its mother. “She has not a feature like me, nor like her father, either, unless it is something in the expression of her eyes and the gesture of her hands,” she often thought, as she studied Fanny’s face and wondered where she got her blue eyes and fair hair and the delicacy of her complexion and form. “I believe she gets it a hundred years back from ’Tina,” she sometimes said, and then for a while rebelled against the heritage she had given her lovely daughter. “She shall never know of it,” she thought, and kept it to herself until Judge Prescott’s death, when it seemed necessary to tell Fanny of her real father. Seizing upon something inadvertently spoken, Fanny, who was persistent and determined, never rested until she knew the whole story as her mother knew it. Over the father killed in the mines she wept bitterly, while the tragedy filled her with horror and for a time she refused to see anyone lest they should read in her face the secret which was making her life miserable. She had been so proud of being a Prescott and proud of her supposed father that it was hard to find herself suddenly stranded with no father, no name of which to boast, and she had dreamed many a night of the scaffold and of ’Tina, whom she was sure she resembled. “What will Roy say when he knows,” had been in her thoughts all the long summer while she was with her mother in the quiet mountain resort. That Roy loved her she knew and that he would sometime tell her so she was sure. “And when he does I must tell him everything and he will not care for me any more,” she thought. He had declared his love. She had told him everything, and he did not care; he could even jest about ’Tina and talk of a cottage to shield her from the weather. The revulsion of feeling was great, and Fanny’s face was radiant with happiness, when Mrs. Prescott appeared suddenly in the door.