Once, led by the elusive light of tremulous hope, he had vowed to make Eva Somerville his own, defying the vendetta of hate that had held their youth so sternly apart. He had loved her to madness; he was stunned by her pride and scorn that refused to forgive the deception he had practiced for both their sakes, that they might defy fate and be happy. With her last frenzied words to him, hope had fallen dead in his heart. He felt she was lost to him forever. When the prison doors clanged behind him he came forth a free man with a new purpose in his mind--to forget. For years he had been a slave to beauty’s spell, with a dream of love in his heart. All was over now, the hopes, the fears, and the longings. He said to himself over and over that he must never look again upon the fatally fair face that had wrought his undoing. He must thrust her from his heart, he must forget. He knew that Eva’s father had claimed her and taken her away to a new life of ease and luxury, where her wonderful beauty would find its appropriate setting, and he was generously glad that it was so. For him, too, life had altered in many ways. From being just comfortably well off, the Ludingtons were on the way to become millionaires owing to the abundant flow of their several oil wells. He would not have to practice his profession any more unless he chose, and he decided to seek in travel and foreign study surcease for a tortured heart. His parents did not say him nay. They realized that it would not be well for him to locate at Fernside again. It would be too painful, with its associations. He became a lonely wanderer for a while, until time and distance had in some wise seared the bleeding wound in his heart; then he became a student in a Parisian school of medicine for specialists, studying diseases of the brain, for which he had acquired a taste in his short stay at the Weston lunatic asylum. There he remained almost two years, only returning home when he began to believe that his heart was cured of its grievous wound, that he could bear to meet Eva again if by chance their paths should cross, with the calmness of indifference, mixed with disdain at her cruelty. He knew that she lived in New York. Perhaps it was for that very reason he decided to remain there for a time before returning home. He wished to convince himself of his perfect cure. The poor fellow, instead of studying brain lesions, might better have investigated incurable heart maladies. To give himself an excuse for staying he consented to act as a substitute for a famous medical friend of his in a famous New York hospital while his friend went abroad for a needed rest during the winter months. Thus he was in a position to learn all of his lady’s life and thoughts that lay open to public view. More than once he had seen her, too, at opera or ball, or in her carriage in the park, though she dreamed not of the nearness of the discarded lover who filled so many mournful thoughts.