battle of Monmouth, in
June, 1778."

"My God, my God!" Abner exclaimed, turning faint and sick, while the
perspiration stood in great drops upon his forehead and about his drawn
lips. He threw himself into a chair, and buried his face in his hands.

"My poor lad! my dear son!" said his uncle, sobbingly, standing over
the stricken boy, and laying a hand tenderly on the bowed head. "Would
that you could have been spared this. I have tried, God knows I have
tried, to hide this from you."

"Yes, yes!" muttered Abner, grasping his uncle's hand, but not looking
up, "you have done the best you could for me. You are all I have left
now, you and Aunt Rachel. All else is gone. I a bastard! My father,
whose memory I have revered as that of a brave soldier who gave his
life for his country, a dastardly libertine! And my precious young
mother--oh, my God in heaven! I can not bear this. Would that I were
lying by your side, my poor, innocent, deceived mother; or, better
still, that I had never been born! I have no name, no place in the
world!" and as he thought of Betty, his heart was wrung with such agony
as few can ever feel.

After a time, when the first storm of grief and horror had subsided
somewhat, he again spoke. "Uncle Richard, if that clandestine marriage
with Sarah Pepper was valid, why the open marriage five months later?"
he asked, clinging to this straw of hope.

"Your poor mother asked that, my boy," Dudley replied, "and Sarah told
her this: Several years before Sarah met Logan, her father had disowned
and driven from home his son, Fletcher, on account of dishonorable
conduct. The will, made soon after Sarah had been forbidden to have
anything to do with Logan, left everything to her who, as this will
read, 'had been a loving and dutiful daughter, ever ready to yield her
own will in obedience to her father.' When the purport of the will was
made known, after Jackson Pepper's death, Logan urged upon Sarah that
the clandestine marriage ceremony must never be revealed, lest Fletcher
Pepper should try to break the will on the plea that Sarah had not been
a dutiful and obedient daughter."

"But why," asked Abner, "if she had discovered in the interval between
the two marriages that this man Logan did not love her, and was a
reckless, bad man, did she still wish to have more to do with him? Why,
instead, did not she still hide the fact of the clandestine marriage,
and refuse to go through with the open ceremony?"