art, playing her false? The figure before her
was instinct with pulsating life. The hands she saw, clasped together,
pressed deep into a swelling bosom that heaved with each panting breath.
The face she saw--white, rapt, strangely glowing, with parted, quivering
lips, with great, staring, tragic eyes--this could not be Madeline
Hammond's face.

Yet as she looked she knew no fancy could really deceive her, that she
was only Madeline Hammond come at last to the end of brooding dreams.
She swiftly realized the change in her, divined its cause and meaning,
accepted it as inevitable, and straightway fell back again into the mood
of bewildering amaze.

Calmness was unattainable. The surprise absorbed her. She could not go
back to count the innumerable, imperceptible steps of her undoing. Her
old power of reflecting, analyzing, even thinking at all, seemed to have
vanished in a pulse-stirring sense of one new emotion. She only felt
all her instinctive outward action that was a physical relief, all her
involuntary inner strife that was maddening, yet unutterably sweet; and
they seemed to be just one bewildering effect of surprise.

In a nature like hers, where strength of feeling had long been inhibited
as a matter of training, such a transforming surprise as sudden
consciousness of passionate love required time for its awakening, time
for its sway.

By and by that last enlightening moment came, and Madeline Hammond faced
not only the love in her heart, but the thought of the man she loved.

Suddenly, as she raged, something in her--this dauntless new
personality--took arms against indictment of Gene Stewart. Her mind
whirled about him and his life. She saw him drunk, brutal; she saw him
abandoned, lost. Then out of the picture she had of him thus slowly grew
one of a different man--weak, sick, changed by shock, growing strong,
strangely, spiritually altered, silent, lonely like an eagle, secretive,
tireless, faithful, soft as a woman, hard as iron to endure, and at the
last noble.

She softened. In a flash her complex mood changed to one wherein she
thought of the truth, the beauty, the wonder of Stewart's uplifting.
Humbly she trusted that she had helped him to climb. That influence
had been the best she had ever exerted. It had wrought magic in her own
character. By it she had reached some higher, nobler plane of trust in
man. She had received infinitely more than she had given.

Her swiftly flying memory seemed to a