“Remember, sir,” sternly said the Western millionaire, “I know where the money is going. And it is the very last dollar of mine that you will ever see. Your wife”—Garston stopped, shamefaced, for the shadow of a darling sin now rose up between him and the new-born hope of meeting his own child in the coming years.
The spell of Margaret Cranstoun was strong upon him now. “I can atone; Katharine shall not live to suffer poverty,” he groaned, as Vreeland sped away with a check for forty thousand dollars. And so, a manly throb of remorse made him generous to Katharine Norreys’ hoodwinked husband.
The rain was falling in torrents when the hooded form of a stately woman descended at the Hotel Belgravia on a storm-darkened night a week later. The drenched cabman wondered at the hurried liberality of his fare, and then hastened away far beyond the row of blinking lights.
Up the stairway to the first story, the visitor sped with no uncertain foot, the “parlor watch” noticing with surprise the white robes beneath the lady’s shrouding cloakings. For it was a fearful night without; those festal robes were but a mockery in the storm-lashed darkness.
“One of our regulars caught out in this squall,” sleepily muttered the waiter, resuming his novel.
Onward, guided by a surely retentive memory, the woman sped through the halls, and pressed her hand upon a doorknob which yielded to her touch.
The door was quickly closed, and there, surrounded by all the belongings of a happy family circle, the long sundered foes met in silence before a cheerful fire which blazed upon the hearth.
In James Garston’s startled eyes there was an expression of wondering mystery. For with a woman’s self-protective instinct, his estranged wife had eluded her household at the “Circassia,” and stolen away from the dinner circle, robed in a costume of stainless white.
Down the deserted side stairway, she had fled, swathed in secretly purchased storm wrappings such as a woman of the people might wear. And now, she looked strangely young and fair as he sprang toward her. She had not been recognized by the hotel attaches; no one had seen her leave the “Circassia.”
And neither Justine, the watchful, nor the amanuensis knew—not even the butler detective—that their mistress had gone forth in the storm, her own apartment doors being locked. She had victoriously passed all the dangers which she feared. A wild haste now possessed her; only to be safe at home again!