It was half-past nine o'clock next morning when the man-servant at Sir Anthony Merrick's in Harley Street brought up to his master's room a plain hand-written card on which he read the name, "Dolores Barton."

"Does the girl want to blackmail me?" Sir Anthony thought testily.

The great doctor's old age was a lonely and a sordid one. He was close on eighty now, but still to this day he received his patients from ten to one, and closed his shrivelled hand with a clutch on their guineas. For whom, nobody knew. Lady Merrick was long dead. His daughters were well married, and he had quarrelled with their husbands. Of his two younger sons, one had gone into the Fusiliers and been speared at Suakim; the other had broken his neck on a hunting-field in Warwickshire. The old man lived alone, and hugged his money-bags. They were the one thing left for which he seemed to retain any human affection.

So, when he read Dolly's card, being by nature suspicious, he felt sure the child had called to see what she could get out of him.

But when he descended to the consulting-room with stern set face, and saw a beautiful girl of seventeen awaiting him,—a tall sunny-haired girl, with Alan's own smile and Alan's own eyes,—he grew suddenly aware of an unexpected interest. The sun went back on the dial of his life for thirty years or thereabouts, and Alan himself seemed to stand before him. Alan, as he used to burst in for his holidays from Winchester! After all, this pink rosebud was his eldest son's only daughter.

Chestnut hair, pearly teeth, she was Alan all over.

Sir Anthony bowed his most respectful bow, with old-fashioned courtesy.

"And what can I do for you, young lady?" he asked in his best professional manner.

"Grandfather," the girl broke out, blushing red to the ears, but saying it out none the less; "Grandfather, I'm your granddaughter, Dolores Barton."

The old man bowed once more, a most deferential bow. Strange to say, when he saw her, this claim of blood pleased him.

"So I see, my child," he answered. "And what do you want with me?"

"I only knew it last night," Dolly went on, casting down those blue eyes in her shamefaced embarrassment. "And this morning . . . I've come to implore your protection."

"That's prompt," the old man replied, with a curious smile, half suspicious, half satisfied. "From whom, my little one?" And his hand caressed her shoulder.

"From my mother," Dolly answered, blushing still deeper crimson. "From the mother who put this injustice upon me. From the mother who, by her own confession, might have given me an honorable birthright, like any one else's, and who cruelly refused to."

The old man eyed her with a searching glance.

"Then she hasn't brought you up in her own wild ideas?" he said. "She hasn't dinged them into you!"

"She has tried to," Dolly answered. "But I will have nothing to do with them. I hate her ideas, and her friends, and her faction."

Sir Anthony drew her forward and gave her a sudden kiss. Her spirit pleased him.

"That's well, my child," he answered. "That's well—for a beginning."

Then Dolly, emboldened by his kindness,—for in a moment, somehow, she had taken her grandfather's heart by assault,—began to tell him how it had all come about; how she had received an offer from a most excellent young man at Combe Mary in Dorsetshire,—very well connected, the squire of his parish; how she had accepted him with joy; how she loved him dearly; how this shadow intervened; how thereupon, for the first time, she had asked for and learned the horrid truth about her parentage; how she was stunned and appalled by it; how she could never again live under one roof with such a woman; and how she came to him for advice, for encouragement, for assistance. She flung herself on his mercy. Every word she spoke impressed Sir Anthony. This was no mere acting; the girl really meant it. Brought up in those hateful surroundings, innate purity of mind had preserved her innocent heart from the contagion of example. She spoke like a sensible, modest, healthy English maiden. She was indeed a granddaughter any man might be proud of. 'Twas clear as the sun in the London sky to Sir Anthony that she recoiled with horror from her mother's position. He sympathized with her and pitied her. Dolores, all blushes, lifted her eyelids and looked at him. Her grandfather drew her towards him with a smile of real tenderness, and, unbending as none had seen him unbend before since Alan's death, told her all the sad history as he himself envisaged it. Dolores listened and shuddered. The old man was vanquished. He would have taken her once to himself, he said, if Herminia had permitted it; he would take her to himself now, if Dolores would come to him.

As for Dolly, she lay sobbing and crying in Sir Anthony's arms, as though she had always known him. After all, he was her grandfather. Nearer to her in heart and soul than her mother. And the butler could hardly conceal his surprise and amazement when three minutes later Sir Anthony rang the bell, and being discovered alone with a strange young lady in tears, made the unprecedented announcement that he would see no patients at all that morning, and was at home to nobody.

But before Dolly left her new-found relation's house, it was all arranged between them. She was to come there at once as his adopted daughter; was to take and use the name of Merrick; was to see nothing more of that wicked woman, her mother; and was to be married in due time from Sir Anthony's house, and under Sir Anthony's auspices, to Walter Brydges.

She wrote to Walter then and there, from her grandfather's consulting-room. Numb with shame as she was, she nerved her hand to write to him. In what most delicate language she could find, she let him plainly know who Sir Anthony was, and all else that had happened. But she added at the end one significant clause: "While my mother lives, dear Walter, I feel I can never marry you."

XXIII

When she returned from Sir Anthony's to her mother's lodgings, she found Herminia, very pale, in the sitting-room, waiting for her. Her eyes were fixed on a cherished autotype of a Pinturicchia at Perugia,—Alan's favorite picture. Out of her penury she had bought it. It represented the Madonna bending in worship over her divine child, and bore the inscription: "Quem genuit adoravit." Herminia loved that group. To her it was no mere emblem of a dying creed, but a type of the eternal religion of maternity. The Mother adoring the Child! 'Twas herself and Dolly.

"Well?" Herminia said interrogatively, as her daughter entered, for she half feared the worst.

"Well," Dolores answered in a defiant tone, blurting it out in sudden jerks, the rebellion of a lifetime finding vent at last. "I've been to my grandfather, my father's father; and I've told him everything; and it's all arranged: and I'm to take his name; and I'm to go and live with him."

"Dolly!" the mother cried, and fell forward on the table with her face in her hands. "My child, my child, are you going to leave me?"

"It's quite time," Dolly answered, in a sullen, stolid voice. "I can't stop here, of course, now I'm almost grown up and engaged to be married, associating any longer with such a woman as you have been. No right-minded girl who respected herself could do it."

Herminia rose and faced her. Her white lips grew livid. She had counted on every element of her martyrdom,—save one; and this, the blackest and fiercest of all, had never even occurred to her. "Dolly," she cried, "oh, my daughter, you don't know what you do! You don't know how I've loved you! I've given up my life for you. I thought when you came to woman's estate, and learned what was right and what wrong, you would indeed rise up and call me blessed. And now,—oh, Dolly, this last blow is too terrible. It will kill me, my darling. I can't go on out-living it."

"You will," Dolly answered. "You're strong enough and wiry enough to outlive anything. . . . But I wrote to Walter from Sir Anthony's this morning, and told him I would wait for him if I waited forever. For, of course, while YOU live, I couldn't think of marrying him. I couldn't think of burdening an honest man with such a mother-in-law as you are!"

Herminia could only utter the one word, "Dolly!" It was a heart-broken cry, the last despairing cry of a wounded and stricken creature.

XXIV

That night, Herminia Barton went up sadly to her own bed-room. It was the very last night that Dolores was to sleep under the same roof with her mother. On the morrow, she meant to remove to Sir Anthony Merrick's.

As soon as Herminia had closed the door, she sat down to her writing-table and began to write. Her pen moved of itself. And this was her letter:—

"MY DARLING DAUGHTER,—By the time you read these words, I shall be no longer in the way, to interfere with your perfect freedom of action. I had but one task left in life—to make you happy. Now I find I only stand in the way of that object, no reason remains why I should endure any longer the misfortune of living.

"My child, my child, you must see, when you come to think it over at leisure, that all I ever did was done, up to my lights, to serve and bless you. I thought, by giving you the father and the birth I did, I was giving you the best any mother on earth had ever yet given her dearest daughter. I believe it still; but I see I should never succeed in making YOU feel it. Accept this reparation. For all the wrong I may have done, all the mistakes I may have made, I sincerely and earnestly implore your forgiveness. I could not have had it while I lived; I beseech and pray you to grant me dead what you would never have been able to grant me living.

"My darling, I thought you would grow up to feel as I did; I thought you would thank me for leading you to see such things as the blind world is incapable of seeing. There I made a mistake; and sorely am I punished for it. Don't visit it upon my head in your recollections when I can no longer defend myself.

"I set out in life with the earnest determination to be a martyr to the cause of truth and righteousness, as I myself understood them. But I didn't foresee this last pang of martyrdom. No soul can tell beforehand to what particular cross the blind chances of the universe will finally nail it. But I am ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is close at hand. I have fought a good fight; I have finished my course; I have kept the faith I started in life with. Nothing now remains for me but the crown of martyrdom. My darling, it is indeed a very bitter cup to me that you should wish me dead; but 'tis a small thing to die, above all for the sake of those we love. I die for you gladly, knowing that by doing so I can easily relieve my own dear little girl of one trouble in life, and make her course lie henceforth through smoother waters. Be happy! be happy! Good-by, my Dolly! Your mother's love go forever through life with you!

"Burn this blurred note the moment you have read it. I inclose a more formal one, giving reasons for my act on other grounds, to be put in, if need be, at the coroner's inquest. Good-night, my heart's darling. Your truly devoted and affectionate

MOTHER.

"Oh, Dolly, my Dolly, you never will know with what love I loved you."

When she had finished that note, and folded it reverently with kisses and tears, she wrote the second one in a firm hand for the formal evidence. Then she put on a fresh white dress, as pure as her own soul, like the one she had worn on the night of her self-made bridal with Alan Merrick. In her bosom she fastened two innocent white roses from Walter Brydges's bouquet, arranging them with studious care very daintily before her mirror. She was always a woman. "Perhaps," she thought to herself, "for her lover's sake, my Dolly will kiss them. When she finds them lying on her dead mother's breast, my Dolly may kiss them." Then she cried a few minutes very softly to herself; for no one can die without some little regret, some consciousness of the unique solemnity of the occasion.

At last she rose and moved over to her desk. Out of it she took a small glass-stoppered phial, that a scientific friend had given her long ago for use in case of extreme emergency. It contained prussic acid. She poured the contents into a glass and drank it off. Then she lay upon her bed and waited for the only friend she had left in the world, with hands folded on her breast, like some saint of the middle ages.

Not for nothing does blind fate vouchsafe such martyrs to humanity. From their graves shall spring glorious the church of the future.

When Dolores came in next morning to say good-by, she found her mother's body cold and stiff upon the bed, in a pure white dress, with two crushed white roses just peeping from her bodice.

Herminia Barton's stainless soul had ceased to exist forever.