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"When he lay dying, he told me that, although you yourself did not know it, you were of different blood and caste from your associates in Limasito. His own words were that you were born a lady and must go back to your own." "Dad said that?" Willa's lips quivered. "I learned to-day that he was in love with my mother always, and she had told him her whole story. I have found a friend here, too, Mr.

Willa's tones rang out without passion but clarion clear in her absolute certitude. "Anyone who knew Dad ever so slightly would testify to its falseness. Why did he not keep himself informed of my grandfather's changing attitude and come forward and claim the inheritance when the search for me began?

In the society column of a belated newspaper which reached me yesterday, I read that two of the principal stock-holders, Mason North and your cousin, Ripley Halstead, together with their families, had gone also in a private car to Mexico. You will return to New York now, will you not?" Willa's eyes sparkled dangerously and she clenched her little hands.

The face before her was drawn and scarred as if the hot hand of wrath had clawed it, searing and distorting it to the hideous, grinning semblance of a mask. "I beg your pardon." Willa's voice was very gentle. "I am looking for someone known as Klondike Kate. If you are she, I have a great favor to ask of you."

Vernon stopped, and added in sudden suspicion: "I say, you didn't give me away? You didn't mention ?" "I?" Willa's eyes widened demurely. "I expressed polite regret, of course. What have I to do with motor accidents?" "Nothing, I hope, if you go slow," Vernon hesitated. "I don't want to butt in, Willa, but I'd like to give you a hint, if you don't mind. Gray cars are not invisible."

At the bottom two signatures were appended, the first in the same painstaking hand as the body of the document, but at the second Willa's breath caught again in her throat and her eyes blurred. The letters before her, in the same angular heavily down-stroked writing she knew so well, formed the name of Gentleman Geoff, but a word had been added; one that she had never seen or heard before.

Dinner-time came and passed, and the Halstead family sat in strained silence, their engagements forgotten in the new anxiety which enshrouded them. Mason North, hastily summoned to the conference, paced the floor restlessly. "It was a mistake, Irene!" he said at last. "If you had told me I would never have sanctioned it. You can't treat a girl of Willa's type that way."

Willa buried her face in the pillow and a little creeping warmth stole through her veins. It was good to be alive, after all. But he was still ignorant of the truth about that letter! At the thought Willa's heart contracted and the quick, scalding tears of weakness came to her eyes. He still believed that she had wantonly led him on and trampled him beneath her feet in sheer joy of conquest.

Nothing loth, Winnie complied and the other heard him through in silence, until he told of Willa's disappearance the morning after the revelation, and the little note she had left behind her. "I swear I thought the governor would spill over when he read it to me," Winnie concluded. "It was sort of fine for her to go away like that.

The doll-like beauty was gone in a distortion of anger, but there was a suggestion of malignant triumph, too, which aroused Willa's apprehension. She knew that in her heart Angie despised her as an upstart and bitterly resented her small success in the social world, beside blaming her for the episode with Starr Wiley. She remembered, too, how Angie had betrayed her to him.