action. It was like John Wingfield, Sr.'s after
Jack had left the library.

"This is the first time we have ever met to speak," said Prather, easily.

"Yes!" assented Jack, the gray settling back into desert and the blue
into sky and the zigzag flashes becoming only the brilliance of late
afternoon sunshine.

"Certainly it is time that we got acquainted, brother," said Prather.

"It is!" agreed Jack. "It is time that I knew your story!"

"Which you have hardly heard from your--I mean, our father!" The pause
between the "your" and the "our" was made with an appreciative
significance. "Well, you see, I was the brother who had the mole on
his cheek!"

"Yes--pitifully yes!" said Jack, with a kind of horror at the expression
of this face in his father's likeness, no less than at the words.

"Why, no! I've often thought of _you_ rather pitifully!" said Prather.

"You well might!" Jack answered, feelingly. "We may well share a common
pity for each other."

There was no sign that John Prather subscribed to the sentiment except in
a certain quizzical turn of his lips, as he looked away.

"Yes, the story has been kept from me. I have come for it!" said Jack.

"That is raking out the skeletons. But why not rake out our skeletons
together, you and I?" said Prather.

It was clear that he enjoyed the prospect as an opportunity for
retributive enlightenment.

"To begin with, I have the rights of primogeniture in my favor," he said.
"I was born a day before you were, in the same city of New York. My
mother's name was not down in the telephone list as Mrs. Wingfield,
however--I look at it all philosophically, you understand--and it was
just that which made the difference between you and me, outside of the
difference of our natures. But I am proud of my birth on both sides, in
my own way. My mother was won without marriage and she was true to
father. A woman of real ability, my mother! She was well suited to be
John Wingfield's wife; better, I think, in the practical world of
materialism than your mother. By a peculiar coincidence, unknown to
father, my mother called in Dr. Bennington. So you and I have a further
bond, in that the same doctor brought us into the world."

"And my mother must have known this!" Jack exclaimed, in racking horror.

At last the cause of her exile was clear in all its grisly monstrousness;
the source of the pain in her eyes in the portrait had been traced home.
Again he saw her white and trembl