At The Mystery Tree

With all the ardor of a strong nature that has found the hidden spring of human love, Mark Griffin loved Ruth Atheson. She had come into his life as the realization of an ideal which since boyhood, so he thought, had been forming in his heart. In one instant she had given that ideal a reality. For her sake he had forgotten obstacles, had resolved to overcome them or smash them; but now the greatest of them all insisted on raising itself between them. Poor, he could still have married her; rich, it would have been still easier so far as his people were concerned; but as a grand duchess she was neither rich nor poor. The blood royal was a bar that Mark knew he could not cross except with ruin to both; nor was he foolish enough to think that he would be permitted to cross it even did he so will. Secret agents would take care of that. There was no spot on earth that could hide this runaway girl longer than her royal father desired. Mark Griffin would have blessed the news that Ruth Atheson was really only the daughter of a beggar, or anything but what he now believed her to be.

Then there was the man Saunders had spoken of, but Mark thought little of him. Whatever he had been to the girl once, Mark felt that the officer was out of her life now and that she no longer cared for him.