e history of the world, has had
triumphs over all the other passions; triumphs over destitution and
trials and tortures; over all the temptations incident to life; triumphs
to which no other impulse of the human heart--not even the love of man
for woman--has ever risen. One of the most brilliant men I had ever
known once said in court; "Woman, alone, shares with the Creator the
privilege of communing with an unborn human being"; and, with this
privilege, the Creator seems to have shared with woman a part of His own
great love. All other love in our race is merely human. The play, from
this time on, becomes the story of a mother's love.

Acts fourth and fifth. Two years later Lilian is at the home of her
father in New York. Her husband has disappeared. His name was on the
passenger list of a wrecked steamer; and no other word of him or of the
child has been heard. If he had left the little girl in the care of
others, it is unknown to whom or where. So Lilian is a widow and
childless. She is fading, day by day, and is hardly expected to live.
Her mind, tortured by the suspense, which, worse than certainty, is
gradually yielding to hallucinations which keep her little one ever
present to her fancy. Harold Routledge was wounded seriously in the
duel, but not killed; he is near Lilian; seeing her every day; but he is
her friend, rather than her lover, now; she talks with him of her child,
and he feels how utterly hopeless his own passion is in the presence of
an all-absorbing mother's love. It is discovered that the child is
living peacefully among kind guardians in a French convent; and
Routledge determines to cross the ocean with the necessary evidence and
bring the little one back to its mother. He breaks the news to Lilian
tenderly and gently. A gleam of joy illuminates her face for the first
time since the terrible night, two years before, and Routledge feels
that the only barrier to his own happiness has been removed. But the
sudden return and reappearance of the husband falls like a stroke of
fate upon both. As the curtain descends on the fourth act, Lilian lies
fainting on the floor, with Natalie at her side, while the two men stand
face to face above the unconscious woman whom they both love. Three
lives ruined--because Lilian's father, having lost his wealth, in his
old age, dared not, as he himself expressed it, leave a tenderly
nurtured daughter to a merciless world. The world is merciless, perhaps,
but it is not