action a pregnant significance and furnished absolution for
every crime.

In the meantime Amanda grew to be a blue-eyed, charming child--gentle
and caressing and the image of the man of whose love she was the
impassioned gift.

But Fate, which seems to play its gigantic pranks upon men in the act
of punishing them, brought it to pass that the child seemed also to
bear some slight resemblance to the stranger who, bowed and servile,
stupidly industrious, sucking cigars, was to be seen at her
mother's side.

Never was father more utterly devoted to the fruit of his loins than
this gulled fellow to the strange child to whom the mother did not
even--by kindly inactivity--give him a borrowed right. The more
carefully she sought to separate the child from him, the more
adoringly and tenaciously did he cling to it.

With terror and rage Toni was obliged to admit to herself that no sum
would ever suffice to make Weigand agree to a divorce that separated
him definitely from the child. And dreams and visions, transplanted
into her brain from evil books, filled Toni's nights with the glitter
of daggers and the stain of flowing blood. And fate seemed to urge on
the day when these dreams must take on flesh....

One day she found in the waste-paper basket which she searched
carefully after every mail-delivery, an advertisement which commended
to the buying public a new make of type-writer.