'd have
lived and died as you've been, just as if I'd been your father."

"Then you are not?" Tony exclaimed, turning on the man with a fierce
earnestness.

"No, Tony, I ain't; but you'd never have heard it from me save this way.
And now you know--well, it don't make no difference. You're just as you
always have been--no more, no less. I'd never have told you, nor would
your----" he stopped as he realized that the word which was on his
tongue no longer applied.

"My--my mother," Tony said, with a different ring in his voice and a
different look in his eyes.

"No, lad--no! 'Tain't that way," Taylor exclaimed warmly. "She's been
your mother--and more maybe."

The dull wits for once acted quickly, and into Taylor's mind there came
on the moment the memory of that night a score of years ago, when he saw
his wife clutch the nameless babe and clasp it to her bosom, and the
same fling of memory brought back also the building of the slim rail
fence round the little mound in the corner of the paddock--the fence
that was never without a trailing, flowering vine growing over it--and
the dull, prosaic mind tried to understand something of the beauty and
the glamour of it, but only grew more confused under the spell of
unfamiliar emotion.

"You should have left it as it was, lad; you should have left it as it
was," he mumbled. "Where's the good of stirring it up now? It's twenty
years and more ago."

"It's _now_ to me--now and always," Tony answered. "And I want to know
it all--everything."

Taylor wondered. Should he tell the story in his own heavy fashion, or
go and ask his wife to tell it? There was no sense in keeping it a
secret any more now, but he remembered his wife's words of twenty years
before, "No one shall take him from me; no one--never."

"We'll go and ask the missus," he said; and together they walked to the
house, silent.

At the door Mrs. Taylor met them. Before she could speak Taylor
interposed.

"He's heard something of the yarn, and wants to know the facts," he
said; "so we came along to you."

Taking the remark to apply to what she herself had in her mind, Mrs.
Taylor put her hand on Tony's arm and smiled.

"Why, there's nothing to fret about," she said. "It isn't your loss;
it's hers, if she's that sort of girl. Let her please herself, I say;
and if she's fool enough----"

"'Tain't that," Taylor exclaimed. "It's--that chap who came here years
ago has been around, or the yarn has, and Tony's