's apartments. "Make yourself comfortable. I'll
start a fire on the hearth in this bedroom and the adjoining
sitting-room."

"Well, I'll be"--Treadwell glanced about at the plain
luxury--"eternally flambusted! If you are not a----" Then he laughed.

It was after the evening meal which Sally served in silent, morose
dignity, that the three men went to Sandy's study. The shed-rooms were
attached to the main cabin by a narrow hallway and this passage was
dark and cold. Coming from it into the warmth and glow of the room
filled with books and pictures, Treadwell paused to glance about and
exclaim before he took the easiest chair by the hearth and accepted
pipe and tobacco. Martin was ill at ease and looked helplessly now and
again to his son for leadings with this stranger who laughed so
constantly and regarded him as if he were a person of inferiority and
lack of intelligence who must, nevertheless, be treated with kindness
and tolerance.

"I suppose," Treadwell remarked when the three had finally settled into
some kind of comfort, "I suppose, Sand, you wonder how I found you out?"

Sandy had wondered but had restrained his curiosity. He looked now at
the big, handsome fellow and again was seized with the sense of chill
that he had felt in the afternoon.

"It sounds like a fairy story--a best seller or what you will. By and
by"--he glanced at Martin as though to suggest a time when he would be
absent--"I've got a lot to tell you, but something turned turtle in my
affairs and got on to my nerves. Aunt Olive made me consult Doctor
Travers, he's my uncle's pet aversion, you know, because he wanted Aunt
Matilda to go into his sanatorium and Uncle Levi considered it an
insult. Well, I saw Travers and he advised a vacation. 'Get to the
hills,' he suggested, 'and browse a bit. Why don't you go up to that
place--a hole in the ground,' he called it, 'where your uncle has
sent--Morley?' And then it all came out, and by Jove! I found out
that you hailed from the place of my forefathers!"

At this Martin dropped his pipe on the hearth and fixed his dim eyes on
the stranger's face. Back rolled the years that had been but stagnant
pools in poor Martin Morley's life; into focus came the simple hates
and injustices that had brought him where he was.

"Your--forefathers!" he gasped, while a weird familiarity and
resemblance to--he knew not what--made Treadwell something tangible and
actual at last.

"Yes. We stil