She sat down again in the big chair and looked at the box musingly, tenderly.  I leaned forward expectantly.  Again I had the sense of tragedy near me.

Drawing the key from her dress she opened the box and took from it a miniature, gazed at it a minute, and then handed it to me.

“Oh, Mrs. Underwood,” I exclaimed.  “How exquisite.”

The miniature was of the most beautiful child I had ever seen, a tiny girl of perhaps two years.  She stood poised as if running to meet one, her baby arms outstretched.  It was a picture to delight or break a mother’s heart.

I looked up from the miniature to the face of the woman who had handed it to me.

“Yes,” she answered my unspoken query, “my little daughter; my only child.  She is the price I paid for Dicky’s immunity from the scandal which the unjust man that I called husband brought upon me.”

My first impulse was one of horror-stricken sympathy for her.  Then came the reaction.  A flaming jealousy enveloped me from head to foot.

“How she must have loved Dicky to do this for him!” The thought beat upon my brain like a sledge hammer.

“Don’t think that, my dear, for it isn’t true.”  I had not spoken, but with her almost uncanny ability to divine the thoughts of other people she had fathomed mine.  “I was always fond of Dicky, but I never was in love with him.”

“Then why did you make such a sacrifice?” I stammered.

“Why!  There was absolutely no other way,” she said, opening her wonderful eyes wide in amazement that I had not at once grasped her point of view.  “Dicky was absolutely innocent of any wrongdoing, but through a combination of circumstances of which I shall tell you, my husband had gathered a show of evidence which would have won him the divorce if it had been presented.”

“He bargained with me:  I to give up all claim to the baby.  He to withdraw Dicky’s name, and all other charges except that of desertion.  Thus Dicky was saved a scandal which would have followed and hampered him all his life, and I was spared the fastening of a shameful verdict upon me.  Of course, everybody who read about the case and did not know me, believed me guilty anyway, but my friends stood by me gallantly, and that part of it is all right.  But every time I look at that baby face I am tempted to wish that I had let honor, the righting of Dicky, everything go by the boards, and had taken my chance of having her, even if it were only part of the time.”

Her voice was rough, uneven as she finished speaking, but that was the only evidence of the emotion which I knew must have her stretched upon the rack.

Right there I capitulated to Lillian Underwood.  Always, through my dislike and distrust of her, there had struggled an admiration which would not down, even when I thought I had most cause to fear her.

But this revelation of the real bigness of the woman caught my allegiance and fixed it.  She had sacrificed the thing which was most precious to her to keep her ideal of honor unsullied.  I felt that I could never have made a similar sacrifice, but I mentally saluted her for her power to do it.