Church Not Interested in Will.
Father Dorney's attention was called to the fact that McDonald probably had left a considerable portion of his estate to his second wife.
"I suppose he did, but this is a legal matter in which the church is not interested. Mike McDonald and Mary Noonan were legally married in the eyes of the law, and the church, in a Catholic church edifice. We never recognize divorce. Of course, we know it is impossible at times for men and women to live together, and the church permits them to reside apart, but remarriage is impossible as long as both of the parties are still alive.
"McDonald never remarried in the eyes of the church, because his first wife was not dead. By his actions with Dora Feldman he gave great scandal, but before his death he repented of it. If Dora Feldman followed Mike McDonald to his grave, she could not do so from an ecclesiastical standpoint, and in my sermon this morning when I referred to the wife of the dead man I meant Mary Noonan McDonald, the mother of his children."
Mrs. Mary McDonald Changed.
No greater contrast could be conceived than that between the woman reputed to have deserted her husband in turn for a renegade French priest and a minstrel, and the woman who rose to greet the interviewer who called at the Vincennes hotel for Mrs. Mary Noonan McDonald. Twenty years of sorrow have left snow white hair that still crowns her head with the same wealth as that of younger days, and twenty years of struggle to support herself have dulled the fire of those gray eyes that once looked over a smoking revolver with which the girl wife held at bay the police raiders of her husband's gambling house. But the slender figure appeared as erect as ever, though standing forth with an added frailty beside her stalwart, brown-faced son, Guy, and her face, though pale and sad, scarcely confessed to her 60 years of age.
MARY NOONAN McDONALD, MICHAEL C. McDONALD, MRS. MICHAEL C. McDONALD
This is the woman who began her career in Chicago as the helpmate of an old-time gambling king, and is ending her days in the work of rescuing wayward girls; this is the woman who was driven to abandon the name of McDonald and bury her identity for the last fifteen years under the alias of Mrs. Grashoff, holding communication only with her children and secretly visiting Chicago periodically to see them.