that ... or thought
so.

"But when I could, I played truant. I was in a restless state. I remember
how I felt as if it were yesterday. Nothing seemed real, except my father
and mother. I thought about them all the time. I couldn't sleep, and I
couldn't study. I couldn't bear to sit at a desk. I picked up some queer
pals in those months--or they picked me up. I suppose that was the
beginning of the end.

"I think while he was away, finding out terrible, unspeakable things, my
father forgot about me--or else he didn't realize I was big enough to
mind. He never wrote. When he came back, after eleven months, he was an
old man, with gray hair. I'll never forget the night he came, and how he
told me about mother. It was a moonlight night, like this--with no light
in the room. It was the last night of my childhood."

As the man talked, he had lifted his head from the soft pillow of the
girl's white neck, and was looking into her eyes, his face close to hers.
Annesley was not thinking about the diamond.

"For a long time," Knight went on, slowly, "father could not trace my
mother. He expected to find the relations who had sent her word about the
legacy, but they were gone--nobody could tell where. Nobody wanted to
speak of them. They seemed afraid. Father went to the British and
American Embassies; no use! But at last he got to know, in subterranean
ways, that mother hadn't realized how dangerous it is to speak your mind
in Russia. She'd left there before she was sixteen!

"She had said things about her father and mother, and what she thought
of the ruling powers, and that same night--she'd been in Moscow two
days--she and her relatives disappeared. It leaked out through a
member of the secret police that she could have been saved by her
beauty--someone high up offered to get her free. But she preferred
another fate.

"She was sent to Siberia where her father and mother had gone, and had
died years before. My father met a man who had seen her on the way as he
was coming back. She was only just alive. The man was sure she couldn't
have lived more than a few weeks.

"Yet father wouldn't give up. He went after her.... But what's the use of
going on? He found the place where she had died.... Which ends that part
of the story, as a story.

"Only it didn't end it for us. It filled our hearts with bitterness. We
wanted revenge. Yet my father was too good a man to take it when his
chance came. His conscience held him back. B