aradoxical understanding of her which was beyond definition.

"You must know--you would have sometime to know that there was a woman
he loved, whom he intended to marry--but she was separated from him. She
was not what is called a bad woman, she was a working girl. I found her,
this summer, and she told me the story, and she has been under the care
of Mr. Bentley. She disappeared two or three days ago. Your brother
met her again, and he was stricken with apoplexy while with her this
evening. She brought him to Mr. Bentley's house."

"My father--bought her and sent her away."

"You knew?"

"I heard a little about it at the time, by accident. I have always
remembered it.... I have always felt that something like this would
happen."

Her sense of fatality, another impression she gave of living in the
deeper, instinctive currents of life, had never been stronger upon him
than now.... She released his hands.

"How strange," she said, "that the end should have come at Mr.
Bentley's! He loved my mother--she was the only woman he ever loved."

It came to Hodder as the completing touch of the revelation he had half
glimpsed by the bedside.

"Ah," he could not help exclaiming, "that explains much."

She had looked at him again, through sudden tears, as though divining
his reference to Mr. Bentley's grief, when a step make them turn. Eldon
Parr had entered the room. Never, not even in that last interview, had
his hardness seemed so concretely apparent as now. Again, pity seemed
never more out of place, yet pity was Hodder's dominant feeling as
he met the coldness, the relentlessness of the glance. The thing that
struck him, that momentarily kept closed his lips, was the awful,
unconscious timeliness of the man's entrance, and his unpreparedness to
meet the blow that was to crush him.

"May I ask, Mr. Hodder," he said, in an unemotional voice, "what you are
doing in this house?"

Still Hodder hesitated, an unwilling executioner.

"Father," said Alison, "Mr. Hodder has come with a message."

Never, perhaps, had Eldon Parr given such complete proof of his lack of
spiritual intuition. The atmosphere, charged with presage for him, gave
him nothing.

"Mr. Hodder takes a strange way of delivering it," was his comment.

Mercy took precedence over her natural directness. She laid her hand
gently on his arm. And she had, at that instant, no thought of the long
years he had neglected her for her brother.

"It's about--Pre