Mr. Davidson smiled as he put down Captain Shaw's letter. He had received both the communications within a mail of each other, and one supplied information that the other lacked. He had turned the matter over in his mind this way and that, and he now felt very little doubt that this Marjory Davidson was indeed his child. And yet why should the fact that he had a child have been kept from him all these years? What reason could his brother-in-law have had for withholding the knowledge from him? It was all a mystery. He looked back over the lonely years since his wife's death, remembering how in the bitterness of his grief he had thrown himself heart and soul into his work, and had laid the foundations of a fortune. He thought of the time when the rush of gold-seekers to the Klondike had first started, and he had left the company he then represented to start on his own account in the shipping and transportation business, seeing at once that here was a certain road to success. And so it had proved, for to-day his was the best-known and most highly-respected name in all that broad region. But there had been times such as that to which Mr. Hilary Forester had alluded in his letter--when money, success, popularity, all seemed as nothing compared with a wife, a home, a child to love him. He envied the poorest labourer with these blessings. He now felt like a man in a dream. Fifteen years! He saw in fancy the little child he would have loved to take upon his knee; the growing girl learning her first lessons. How he would have cared for her and watched over her, trying to be both father and mother to the motherless child! Now she was growing quickly to womanhood, and he knew nothing of her, nor she of him. A great wave of indignation against his brother-in-law swept over him; it was a downright crime to have kept him in ignorance all these years, and the man should be brought to book. All the old bitterness against his wife's unreasonable brother took hold of him, and Captain Shaw's suggestion as to the forgetting of bygones seemed for a time little likely to be acted upon. But this mood passed, and then a great tenderness towards this unknown daughter of his welled up in his heart, and he made up his mind. He would go as soon as he could, and find out the truth.