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“Did you hear anywhere any mention made of a daughter–the red-haired child of twelve years ago?” inquired Miss Smith.

“To be sure I did, but I’d forgotten about her,” said Mullinix. “Mrs. Sheehan told me that somewhere in her excited narrative Mrs. Vinsolving did say something about the daughter. As nearly as I can recall, she told Mrs. Sheehan that five or six weeks ago, or some such matter, her daughter had tried to kill her and that she thought then the daughter had gone mad, but that now she knew the girl had joined the Kaiser’s gang for pay. I made a mental note of this part of the rigmarole at the time Mrs. Sheehan was repeating it to me, and then it slipped my mind. But now putting that yarn alongside of what Doctor Steele tells me about the symptoms of the disease, I see the connection–first the daughter, then the strange servant girl and finally the Kaiser. But say, I wonder why the daughter hasn’t been keeping some sort of a guard over the poor demented creature? What can she have been thinking about herself to let her mother go running foot-loose round the country, nursing these changing delusions?”

“She couldn’t very well help herself,” put in Miss Smith. “The daughter is in an asylum–put there five weeks ago on the mother’s complaint.”

“But heavens alive, how could that have happened?”

“Very easily–under the laws of this state,” she answered grimly. Then speaking more quickly: “I’ve changed my mind about going to Bellevue with you. Please tell the driver to take me to the Grand Central Station. I don’t know what train I’m going to catch, except that it’s the next one leaving on the Hudson River Division for up state. You go on then, please, to the hospital and find out all you can about this case and call me on the long-distance to-night–no, that won’t do either. I don’t know where I’ll be. I may be in Peekskill or in Albany–I can’t say which. I tell you–I’ll call you at eight o’clock; that will be better.

“No, no!” she went on impetuously, reading on his face the protest he meant to utter. “My wrist is well bandaged and giving me no pain. I’m thinking now of what a poor brave girl had on both her wrists when last I saw her and of what she must have been enduring since then. I’ll explain the biggest chapter of the story to you on the way over before you drop me at the station.”

At the Grand Central she left behind a thoroughly astonished gentleman. He was clear on some points which had been puzzling him from time to time during this exceedingly busy morning, but still much mystified to make out the meaning of Miss Smith’s farewell remark as he put her aboard her train.

“I only wish one thing,” she had said. “I only wish I might take the time to stop at the village of Pleasantdale and break the news to a certain Doctor McGlore who lives there. I trust I am not unduly cattish, but I dearly would love to watch the expression on his face when he heard it. I think I’d do it, too, if I were not starting on the most imperative errand that ever called me in my life.”

A week later, to the day, two expected visitors were ushered into the private chamber of the governor at Albany–one of them a small, exceedingly well-groomed and good-looking woman in her thirties, and one a slender pretty girl with big brown eyes and wonderful auburn hair.

“Governor,” said Miss Smith, “I want the pleasure of introducing to you the gamest girl in the whole world–Margaret Vinsolving.”

He took the firm young hand she offered him. “Miss Vinsolving,” he said, “in the name of the State of New York and on behalf of it I ask your forgiveness for the great and cruel wrong which unintentionally was done to you.”