ild!
The child of so many hopes! The baby that was born to regenerate
humanity!

At last, in a dogged way, Dolly rose once more. She put on her hat
and jacket.

"Where are you going?" her mother asked, terrified.

"I am going out," Dolores answered, "to the post, to telegraph to
him."

She worded her telegram briefly but proudly:

"My mother has told me all. I understand your feeling. Our
arrangement is annulled. Good-by. You have been kind to me."

An hour or two later, a return telegram came:--

"Our engagement remains exactly as it was. Nothing is changed. I
hold you to your promise. All tenderest messages. Letter
follows."

That answer calmed Dolly's mind a little. She began to think after
all,--if Walter still wanted her,--she loved him very much; she
could hardly dismiss him.

When she rose to go to bed, Herminia, very wistful, held out her
white face to be kissed as usual. She held it out tentatively.
Worlds trembled in the balance; but Dolly drew herself back with a
look of offended dignity. "Never!" she answered in a firm voice.
"Never again while I live. You are not fit to receive a pure
girl's kisses."

And two women lay awake all that ensuing night sobbing low on their
pillows in the Marylebone lodging-house.

XXII.

It was half-past nine o'clock next morning when the man-servant at
Sir Anthony Merrick's in Harley Street brought up to his master's
room a plain hand-written card on which he read the name, "Dolores
Barton."

"Does the girl want to blackmail me?" Sir Anthony thought testily.

The great doctor's old age was a lonely and a sordid one. He was
close on eighty now, but still to this day he received his patients
from ten to one, and closed his shrivelled hand with a clutch on
their guineas. For whom, nobody knew. Lady Merrick was long dead.
His daughters were well married, and he had quarrelled with their
husbands. Of his two younger sons, one had gone into the Fusiliers
and been speared at Suakim; the other had broken his neck on a
hunting-field in Warwickshire. The old man lived alone, and hugged
his money-bags. They were the one thing left for which he seemed
to retain any human affection.

So, when he read Dolly's card, being by nature suspicious, he felt
sure the child had called to see what she could get out of him.

But when he descended to the consulting-room with stern set face,
and saw a beautiful girl of seventeen awaiting him,--a