possible past. Wonderful, if the little things of the day,
small but innumerable, should wipe out in the end an entire youth that
took twenty years in building. What is the past after all but a vague
horizon made emphatic by the peaks of memory? What is the future but a
bare plain with no emphasis at all? Man lives only in the present, like
the God whose spirit breathes in him.

Sonia was bent on his not forgetting, however. His heart died within him
when he read in the journals the prominent announcement of the birth of
a son to the lost Horace Endicott, whose woful fate still troubled the
short memory of editors. A son! He crushed the paper in his anguish and
fell again into the old depression. Oh, how thoroughly had God punished
the hidden crimes of this lost woman! A child would have saved her, and
in her hatred of him she had ... he always refused to utter to himself
the thought which here rose before his mind. His head bent in agony.
This child was not his, perhaps not even hers. She had invented it as a
trap for him. Were it really his little one, his flesh and blood, how
eagerly he would have thrown off his present life and flown to its
rescue from such a mother!

Sonia did not hope for such a result. It was her fraudulent mortgage on
the future and its possibilities. The child would be heir to his
property; would have the sympathy and inherit the possessions of his
Aunt Lois; would lull the suspicions concerning its mother, and
conciliate the gossips; and might win him back from hiding, if only to
expose the fraud and take shame from the Endicotts. What a clever and
daring criminal was this woman! With a cleverness always at fault
because of her rare unscrupulousness. Even wickedness has its delicacy,
its modesty, its propriety, which a criminal respects in proportion to
his genius for crime. Sonia offended all in her daring, and lost at
every turn. This trap would catch her own feet. A child! A son! He
shuddered at the thought, and thanked God that he had escaped a new
dishonor. His blood would never mingle with the puddle in Sonia's veins.

He would not permit her to work this iniquity, and to check her he must
risk final success in his plan of disappearance by violating the first
principle of the art: that there be no further connection with the past.
The detectives were watching the path by which he would return, counting
perhaps upon his rage over this fraudulent heir. He must give them their
opportunity