“I am above your power to aid,” the proud woman replied.
“Let me atone,” he begged.
“Dead beyond awakening is my heart, and you know it. Do not now add a hideous insult to Nature to your cowardly abandonment of the past.”
The dull, level coldness of her voice proved to him that she bore a frozen heart, one never to awaken at his touch. He cast himself down before her in a last appeal.
And then, on his knees before the woman whom he had sworn to cherish “till death do us part,” the strong man pleaded for the child whom fate had robbed from the clinging arms of its mother. Margaret Cranstoun sobbed:
“The child! Oh, my God! Never! Name not her name. Me, your victim or your sacrifice. Her name shall never cross your lips. Wherever God’s mercy takes that innocent one, she shall live and die fatherless—save for Him above. I swear it, on the memory of a mother’s natal anguish. And now, Senator James Garston,—”
The stately woman stood before him with the menace of a life in her eyes.
“This is the end of all! Go! You are safe from my vengeance now. I care not how you have dragged yourself up on Fortune’s wheel.
“Go! And if you ever break the sorrow-shaded stillness of my life, then, may God help you. For I will strike you down for the sake of that same fatherless child.”
A black storm of suddenly aroused jealousy swept over Garston’s face.