ake a look at David, and then we'll have dinner. I didn't know it was
so late."

But when she had gone out he did not immediately move. He had been going
over again, painfully and carefully, the things that puzzled him, that
he had accepted before without dispute. David and Lucy's reluctance to
discuss his father; the long days in the cabin, with David helping him
to reconstruct his past; the spring, and that slow progress which now he
felt, somehow, had been an escape.

He ate very little dinner, and Lucy's sense of dread increased. When,
after the meal, she took refuge in her sitting-room on the lower floor
and picked up her knitting, it was with a conviction that it was only a
temporary reprieve. She did not know from what.

She heard him, some time later, coming down from David's room. But he
did not turn into his office. Instead, he came on to her door, stood for
a moment like a man undecided, then came in. She did not look up, even
when very gently he took her knitting from her and laid it on the table.

"Aunt Lucy."

"Yes, Dick."

"Don't you think we'd better have a talk?"

"What about?" she asked, with her heart hammering.

"About me." He stood above her, and looked down, still with the
tenderness with which he always regarded her, but with resolution in his
very attitude. "First of all, I'll tell you something. Then I'll ask you
to tell me all you can."

She yearned over him as he told her, for all her terror. His voice, for
all its steadiness, was strained.

"I have felt for some time," he finished, "that you and David were
keeping something from me. I think, now, that this is what it was. Of
course, you realize that I shall have to know."

"Dick! Dick!" was all she could say.

"I was about," he went on, with his almost terrible steadiness, "to ask
a girl to take my name. I want to know if I have a name to offer her. I
have, you see, only two alternatives to believe about myself. Either
I am Henry Livingstone's illegitimate son, and in that case I have no
right to my name, or to offer it to any one, or I am--"

He made a despairing gesture.

"--or I am some one else, some one who was smuggled out of the mountains
and given an identity that makes him a living lie."

Always she had known that this might come some time, but always too she
had seen David bearing the brunt of it. He should bear it. It was not
of her doing or of her approving. For years the danger of discovery had
hung over her li