e or die, my husband must not have my child. You
must help me.

The second letter was longer, for it contained explanations and reasons.
These were stated baldly, briefly, but for that very quality they rang
luridly dramatic.

The third note was left on Thornton's desk and simply informed him that
she was going to Doris and would never return.

CHAPTER II

"_Minds that sway the future like a tide._"

Sister Angela read her letter sitting before the fire in the living room
at Ridge House.

She read it over and over and then, as was common with her, she clasped
the cross that hung from her girdle--and opened her soul. She called it
prayer. Meredith became personally near her--the written words had
materialized her. With the clairvoyance that had been part of her
equipment in dealing with people and events of the past, Angela began
slowly to understand.

So actually was she possessed by reality that her face grew grim and
deadly pale. She was a woman of experience in the worldly sense, but she
was unyielding in her spiritual interpretation of moral codes. She felt
the full weight of the tragedy that had overwhelmed a girl of Meredith
Thornton's type. She had no inclination, nor was there time now, to
consider Thornton's side of this terrible condition. She must act for
Meredith and Meredith's child.

Folding the letter, she dropped it into her pocket and sent for Sister
Janice, the housekeeper.

Angela gave silent thanks for Janice's temperament.

Janice was so cheerful as often to depress others; so grateful that she
gloried in self-abnegation and had no curiosity outside a given command.

"The house must be got ready for visitors," Angela informed Janice. "Two
former pupils--and one of them is ill." When she said this Angela
paused. How did she know Meredith was ill?

"Shall I open the west wing?" asked Janice, alert as to her duties.

"Open everything. Have the place at its best; but I would like the
younger sister, Mrs. Thornton, to have the chamber on the south, the
guest chamber."

When Janice had departed, Sister Constance appeared.

In her early days Constance had been a famous nurse and for years
afterward the head of a school for nurses. Her eyes brightened now as
she listened to her superior. She had long chafed under the strain of
inaction. She listened and nodded.

"Everything shall be done as you wish, Sister," she said at last, and
Angela knew that it would be.

Lastly, old