her again, and he was stricken with apoplexy while with her this evening.
She brought him to Mr. Bentley's house."

"My father--bought her and sent her away."

"You knew?"

"I heard a little about it at the time, by accident. I have always
remembered it . . . . I have always felt that something like this
would happen."

Her sense of fatality, another impression she gave of living in the
deeper, instinctive currents of life, had never been stronger upon him
than now. . . . She released his hands.

"How strange," she said, "that the end should have come at Mr. Bentley's!
He loved my mother--she was the only woman he ever loved."

It came to Hodder as the completing touch of the revelation he had half
glimpsed by the bedside.

"Ah," he could not help exclaiming, "that explains much."

She had looked at him again, through sudden tears, as though divining his
reference to Mr. Bentley's grief, when a step make them turn. Eldon Parr
had entered the room. Never, not even in that last interview, had his
hardness seemed so concretely apparent as now. Again, pity seemed never
more out of place, yet pity was Hodder's dominant feeling as he met the
coldness, the relentlessness of the glance. The thing that struck him,
that momentarily kept closed his lips, was the awful, unconscious