stranger to you and his rights all these
years. Ah, Eglington, you never knew what love was, you never had
a heart--experiment, subterfuge, secrecy, 'reaping where you had
not sowed, and gathering where you had not strawed.' Always,
experiment, experiment, experiment!

"I shall be gone in a few hours--I feel it, but before I go I must
try to do right, and to warn you. I have had such bad dreams about
you and Harry--they haunt me--that I am sure you will suffer
terribly, will have some awful tragedy, unless you undo what was
done long ago, and tell the truth to the world, and give your titles
and estates where they truly belong. Near to death, seeing how
little life is, and how much right is in the end, I am sure that I
was wrong in holding my peace; for Harry cannot prosper with this
black thing behind him, and you cannot die happy if you smother up
the truth. Night after night I have dreamed of you in your
laboratory, a vague, dark, terrifying dream of you in that
laboratory which I have hated so. It has always seemed to me the
place where some native evil and cruelty in your blood worked out
its will. I know I am an ignorant woman, with no brain, but God has
given me clear sight at the last, and the things I see are true
things, and I must warn you. Remember that...."

The letter ended there. She had been interrupted or seized with illness,
and had never finished it, and had died a few hours afterwards; and the
letter was now, for the first time, read by her whom it most concerned,
into whose heart and soul the words sank with an immitigable pain
and agonised amazement. A few moments with this death-document had
transformed Hylda's life.

Her husband and--and David, were sons of the same father; and the
name she bore, the home in which she was living, the estates the title
carried, were not her husband's, but another's--David's. She fell back
in her chair, white and faint, but, with a great effort, she conquered
the swimming weakness which blinded her. Sons of the same father! The
past flashed before her, the strange likeness she had observed, the
trick of the head, the laugh, the swift gesture, the something in the
voice. She shuddered as she had done in reading the letter. But they
were related only in name, in some distant, irreconcilable way--in a way
which did not warrant the sudden scarlet flush that flooded her face.
Presently she recovered herself