I hoped against hope that he would give her to me. For he
knew--the hound--knew better than anybody else that all his vile
charges were false."

Her eyes blazed, her voice was strident, her hands clasped and
unclasped. Then, as if a string had been loosened, she sank back in
her chair again.

"But he would not give her to me," she went on dully, "and he could
not even if he would. For his mother, who has the child, is old and
devoted to her. It would kill her to take Marion away from her."

"You saw my pink room?" she demanded abruptly.

I nodded. The memory of that rose-colored nest and the look in my
hostess's eyes when on my other visit she had said she had prepared
the room for a young girl was yet vivid.

"I spent weeks preparing it for her when I heard of her father's
remarriage," she said, "When I finally realized that I could not have
her, I lay ill for weeks in it. On my recovery I vowed that no one
else but she or I should ever sleep there. I have another bedroom
where I sleep most of the time. But sometimes I go in there and spend
the night, and pretend that I have her little body snuggled up close
to me just as it used to be."

The crackling of the logs in the grate was the only sound to be heard
for many minutes.

With her elbow resting on the arm of her chair, her chin cupped in her
hand, her whole body leaning toward the warmth of the fire, she sat
gazing into the leaping flames as if she were trying to read in them
the riddle of the future.

I patiently waited on her mood. That she would open her heart to me
further I knew, but I did not wish to disturb her with either word or
movement.

"I might as well begin at the beginning." There was a note in her
voice that all at once made me see the long years of suffering which
had been hers. "Only the beginning is so commonplace that it lacks
interest. It is the record of a very mediocre stenographer with
aspirations."

That she was speaking of herself her tone told me, but I was genuinely
surprised. Mrs. Underwood was the last woman in the world one would
picture as holding down a stenographer's position.

"I can't remember when I didn't have in the back of my brain the idea
of learning to draw," she went on, "but it took years and years of
uphill work and saving to get a chance. I was an orphan, with nobody
to care whether I lived or died, and nothing but my own efforts to
depend on. But I stuck to it, working in the daytime and studying
eveni