-and I've got your name."

CHAPTER XV. AFTERMATH OF TRAGEDY.

The Gilders, both father and son, endured much suffering throughout the
night and day that followed the scene in Mary Turner's apartment, when
she had made known the accomplishment of her revenge on the older man
by her ensnaring of the younger. Dick had followed the others out of
her presence at her command, emphasized by her leaving him alone when
he would have pleaded further with her. Since then, he had striven to
obtain another interview with his bride, but she had refused him. He was
denied admission to the apartment. Only the maid answered the ringing of
the telephone, and his notes were seemingly unheeded. Distraught by this
violent interjection of torment into a life that hitherto had known no
important suffering, Dick Gilder showed what mettle of man lay beneath
his debonair appearance. And that mettle was of a kind worth while. In
these hours of grief, the soul of him put out its strength. He learned
beyond peradventure of doubt that the woman whom he had married was
in truth an ex-convict, even as Burke and Demarest had declared.
Nevertheless, he did not for an instant believe that she was guilty of
the crime with which she had been originally charged and for which she
had served a sentence in prison. For the rest, he could understand in
some degree how the venom of the wrong inflicted on her had poisoned her
nature through the years, till she had worked out its evil through the
scheme of which he was the innocent victim. He cared little for the
fact that recently she had devoted herself to devious devices for making
money, to ingenious schemes for legal plunder. In his summing of her,
he set as more than an offset to her unrighteousness in this regard the
desperate struggle she had made after leaving prison to keep straight,
which, as he learned, had ended in her attempt at suicide. He knew
the intelligence of this woman whom he loved, and in his heart was
no thought of her faults as vital flaws. It seemed to him rather that
circumstances had compelled her, and that through all the suffering
of her life she had retained the more beautiful qualities of her
womanliness, for which he reverenced her. In the closeness of their
association, short as it had been, he had learned to know something
of the tenderer depths within her, the kindliness of her, the
wholesomeness. Swayed as he was by the loveliness of her, he was yet
more enthralled by those