The first three might be dismissed without argument. She had been no

frequenter of "gambling joints" whatever her peccadilloes; Gabrielle,

he happened to know, had died some eight or ten years ago, and

Mademoiselle Pauline Marie, if she had had a child, which was extremely

doubtful, was the sort that sends unwelcome offspring post haste to the

foundling asylum.

There remained only the spurious Mrs. Medford, and she was the

probability on all counts. What more likely than that she and Mrs. Lawton

had met at one of the great winter hotels in Southern California, and

foregathered? Certainly they would be congenial spirits.

When the baby came Mrs. Lawton would naturally see her through her

trouble, and advise her later what to do with the child. No doubt,

Medford found it in the way.

After that Ruyler could only fumble. Did Medford desert the woman,

driving her on the stage?--or elsewhere? Did they start for Japan, and

did he die on the voyage? Did he merely give the woman a pension and tell

her to go back to Rouen, or to the devil? It was positive that when

Helene was five years old Madame Delano had gone back to her relatives

with some trumped up story and been received by them.

Moreover, this theory coincided with, his belief that Helene's father

was a gentleman. No doubt he had been already married when he met the

young French girl, superbly handsome, and intelligent--possibly at one

of the French watering places, even in Rouen itself, swarming with

tourists in Summer. They might have met in the spacious aisles of the

Cathedral, she risen from her prayers, he wandering about, Baedeker in

hand, and fallen in love at sight. One of Earth's million romances,

regenerating the aged planet for a moment, only to sink back and

disappear into her forgotten dust.

His own romance? What was to be the end of that!

But he returned to his argument. He wanted a coherent story to tell his

wife, and he wanted also to believe that his wife's father had been a

gentleman.

Medford, like so many of his eloping kind, had made instinctively for

California with the beautiful woman he loved but could not marry. Santa

Barbara, Ruyler had heard, had been the favorite haven for two

generations of couples fleeing from irking bonds in the societies of

England and the continent of Europe. Southern California combined a wild

independence with a languor that blunted too sensitive nerves, offered an

equable climate with months on end of out of door life, boating,

shooting, riding, driving, motoring, romantic excursions, and even sport

if a distinguished looking couple played the game well and told a

plausible story.




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