hour or
two?"

Brian stammered out some words of thanks, and drank the water eagerly.
He would not stay, however; he had bad news which compelled him to move
on quickly--as quickly as possible. And then, with a certain whiteness
about the lips, and a look of perplexed pain in his eyes, he picked up
the papers as they lay strewn upon the grass, bowed to Gretchen with
mechanical politeness, and made his way to the door by which he had come
in. One thing he forgot; he never thought of it until long afterwards;
the sweet, frail rose that Brother Dino had placed within his hand when
he bade him God-speed. In less than an hour he was in the train; he
hardly knew why or whither he was bound; he knew only that one of his
restless fits had seized him and was driving him from the town in the
way that it was wont to do.

Mrs. Luttrell's letter was a great shock to him. He never dreamt at
first of questioning the truth of her assertions. He thought it very
likely that she had been perfectly able to judge, and that her husband
had been mistaken in treating the matter as a delusion. At any time,
this conviction would have been a sore trouble to him, for he had loved
her and her husband and Richard very tenderly, but just now it seemed to
him almost more than he could bear. He had divested himself of nearly
the whole of what had been considered his inheritance, because he
disliked so much the thought of profiting by Richard's death; was he
also now to divest himself of the only name that he had known, of the
country that he loved, of the nation that he had been proud to call his
own? If his mother's story were true, he was, as she had said, the son
of an Italian gardener called Vasari; his name then must be Vasari; his
baptismal name he did not know. And Brian Luttrell did not exist; or
rather, Brian Luttrell had been buried as a baby in the little
churchyard of San Stefano. It was a bitter thought to him.

But it could not be true. His whole being rose up in revolt against the
suggestion that the father whom he had loved so well had not been his
own father; that Richard had been of no kin to him. Surely his mother's
mind must have been disordered when she refused to acknowledge him. It
could not possibly be true that he was not her son. At any rate, one
duty was plain to him. He must go to San Stefano and ascertain, as far
as he could, the true history of the Vasari family. And in the meantime
he could write to Mr. Colquhoun. He w