EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK: Incredible, you say?Alas, it was too true!She was dead by her own hand, the beautiful child-wife of Vincent Carew, the millionaire--dead in her youth and beauty, leaving behind her all that life held for a worshipped wife and loving mother; for upstairs at this moment in the silken nursery her child, the baby Kathleen, barely six months old, lay sweetly sleeping, watched by an attentive French bonne, while in the darkened parlor below, the girlish mother, not yet eighteen, lay pale and beautiful in her coffin, with white flowers blooming on the pulseless breast, hiding the crimson stain where the slight jeweled dagger from her hair had sheathed itself in her tortured heart.She was so young, so ignorant, or surely she would have held back her suicidal hand--she would have taken pity on her child, the dark-eyed little heiress she was leaving motherless in the wide, wide world that, whatever else it may give us, can not make up for the loss of the best thing life has to offer--a mother's love!It is always a terrible misfortune to a young girl to be motherless, and it was going to be the tragedy of Kathleen Carew's life that she had no mother. The dagger-thrust that let out the life-blood of unhappy Zaidee Carew turned the whole course of her daughter's life aside into different channels.But that lay in the future. Now all Boston wondered over the tragic death of Vincent Carew's wife, and people asked each other in dismay:"Why did she do it?"No one could answer that question.The world thought that the young wife was perfectly happy.And why not? Surely she had good cause.Vincent Carew, the rich bachelor, who was a power in politics, and aspired to be governor of his state, had married Zaidee Franklyn out of a poverty-stricken home, lifting her at a bound to rank and fortune, and all for love of her fair face.He had snapped his white fingers in the face of the world that called his marriage a mésalliance, and carried everything by storm. For his sake, society--cultured Boston society--had received his wife, the lovely young Southern girl, with her shy ways and neglected education, and for a time all went well.