," he added in cold reproof.

"Do you forget that you asked me to arrange her papers?" she retorted,
stung by his suggestion.

"Your imagination is vivid," he exclaimed. Then he bethought himself
that, after all, he might sorely need all she could give, if things
went against him, and that she was the last person he could afford to
alienate; "but I do remember that I asked you that," he added--"no doubt
foolishly."

"Read what is there," she broke in, "and you will see that it was not
foolish, that it was meant to be." He felt a cold dead hand reaching
out from the past to strike him; but he nerved himself, and his eyes
searched the paper with assumed coolness-even with her he must still be
acting. The first words he saw were: "Why did you not tell me that my
boy, my baby Harry, was not your only child, and that your eldest son
was alive?"

So that was it, after all. Even his mother knew. Master of his nerves
as he was, it blinded him for a moment. Presently he read on--the whole
page--and lingered upon the words, that he might have time to think what
he must say to Hylda. Nothing of the tragedy of his mother touched him,
though he was faintly conscious of a revelation of a woman he had
never known, whose hungering caresses had made him, as a child, rather
peevish, when a fit of affection was not on him. Suddenly, as he read
the lines touching himself, "Brilliant and able and unscrupulous.... and
though he loves me little, as he loves you little too," his eye lighted
up with anger, his face became pale--yet he had borne the same truths
from Faith without resentment, in the wood by the mill that other year.
For a moment he stood infuriated, then, going to the fireplace, he
dropped the letter on the coals, as Hylda, in horror, started forward to
arrest his hand.

"Oh, Eglington--but no--no! It is not honourable. It is proof of all!"

He turned upon her slowly, his face rigid, a strange, cold light in his
eyes. "If there is no more proof than that, you need not vex your mind,"
he said, commanding his voice to evenness.

A bitter anger was on him. His mother had read him through and
through--he had not deceived her even; and she had given evidence
against him to Hylda, who, he had ever thought, believed in him
completely. Now there was added to the miserable tale, that first
marriage, and the rights of David--David, the man who, he was convinced,
had captured her imagination. Hurt vanity played a disproportionate pa