The girl smiled up at him; then turned away. “My father!” she murmured. “He––my father!” she kept repeating, groping her way about the room as if in a haze. “He! It can’t be! It can’t!”
The still dazed Beaubien drew the girl into her arms. “My little princess!” she whispered. “Oh! But who would have dreamed it! Yet I called you that from the very first. But––oh, Carmen! And he––that man––your father!”
“Don’t! Mother, don’t! It––it isn’t proved. It––”
Then the Beaubien’s heart almost stopped. What if it were true? What, then, would this sudden turn in the girl’s life mean to the lone woman who clung to her so?
“No, mother dearest,” whispered Carmen, looking up through her tears. “For even if it should be true, I will not leave you. He––he––”
She stopped; and would speak of him no more.
But neither of them knew as yet that in that marvelous Fifth Avenue palace, behind those drawn curtains and guarded bronze doors, at which an eager crowd stood staring, Ames, the superman, lay dying, his left side, from the shoulder down, paralyzed.
In the holy quiet of the first hours of morning, the mist rose, and the fallen man roused slowly out of his deep stupor. And then through the dim-lit halls of the great mansion rang a piercing cry. For when he awoke, the curtain stood raised upon his life; and the sight of its ghastly content struck wild terror to his naked soul.