The self-protective instinct of the mother brought to her a new life. “No one knows; no one even suspects. There is not a single whisper. Thank God!” And then she vowed on her knees, when left alone, to be brave and true for the child’s sake.
And Hiram Endicott respected her imperial grief. When he returned from dispatching Conyers to recall the fatherless child, he mused: “It is better that I should know nothing more, for there is a strange tangle here.”
And so he was not astonished when his client bade him come back to her on the morrow to escort her to the room of Garston’s last solemn public reception.
“I must see him again for Romaine’s sake. I must look once more upon the face of the father of my child,” was the solemn voice of Nature sweeping away all the meshes of the frail barrier of human hatred which had held them apart.
“God is merciful,” she murmured. “Romaine shall never know, and only learn to wonder over the benefaction of an unknown but generous hand.
“And now, his public name, his barren honors can never be soiled by man’s cold sneer. It is the blessed nepenthe of the silent grave.”
Elaine Willoughby was recalled to a need of stern and instant action by Endicott’s demand for the document, the vastly dangerous paper whose existence now alarmed Senator Alynton. And all alert, she bade her schoolboy servitor summon Roundsman Daly instantly.
“I must forego my full vengeance on Vreeland,” she murmured, “to save my friends. The paper once regained, I can leave the Street forever, but Vreeland’s silence must be first assured. It is better to steal it from its hiding-place, and not wait to trap him there.”
She was keenly suspicious of Justine Duprez, who, hollow-eyed and half-defiant, now demanded an absence of a few days on urgent private affairs. The girl’s burning fever of fear for her lover was almost an ecstasy of jealous agony. She feared a coming storm.
With a single touch of the bell, the Lady of Lakemere called in the private detective. “Detain that woman here, even by the strongest use of force, till Roundsman Daly comes,” she said, with flashing eyes.