ad turned completely round
and placed herself in the opposing ranks!

Raeburn had all his life been fighting against desperate odds, and in
the conflict he had lost well-nigh everything. He had lost his home long
ago, he had lost his father's good will, he had lost the whole of his
inheritance; he had lost health, and strength, and reputation, and
money; he had lost all the lesser comforts of life; and now he said to
himself that he was to lose his dearest treasure of all, his child.

Bitter, hopeless, life-long division had arisen between them. For
twenty-three years he had loved her as truly as ever father loved child,
and this was his reward! A miserable sense of isolation arose in his
heart. Erica had been so much to him how could he live without her? The
muscles of his face quivered with emotion; he clinched his hands almost
fiercely.

Then he tortured himself by letting his thoughts wander back to the
past. That very day years ago, when he had first learned what fatherhood
meant; the pride of watching his little girl as the years rolled on;
the terrible anxiety of one long and dangerous illness she had passed
through how well he remembered the time! They were very poor, could
afford no expensive luxuries; he had shared the nursing with his wife.
One night he remembered toiling away with his pen while the sick child
was actually on his knee; he always fancied that the pamphlet he had
then been at work on was more bitterly sarcastic than anything he had
ever written. Then on once more into years of desperately hard work and
disappointingly small results, imbittered by persecution, crippled by
penalties and never-ending litigation; but always there had been the
little child waiting for him at home, who by her baby-like freedom from
care could make him smile when he was overwhelmed with anxiety. How
could he ever have endured the bitter obloquy, the slanderous attacks,
the countless indignities which had met him on all sides, if there had
not been one little child who adored him, who followed him about like a
shadow, who loved him and trusted him utterly?

Busy as his life had been, burdened as he had been for years with twice
as much work as he could get through, the child had never been crowded
out of his life. Even as a little thing of four years old, Erica
had been quite content to sit on the floor in his study by the hour
together, quietly amusing herself by cutting old newspapers into
fantastic shapes, or by