ecret was thy father's and mine--his and mine alone--and now it
is thine, as it needs must be! Guard it well, my baby, and let it
make thy life and thy manhood full of strength and power and
sweetness and glory and joy, and remember, as thou readest for the
first time this story of thy coming into the world, that thy mother
counted it her greatest, proudest glory to be the chosen love of
thy father, and the mother of his son."

She had touched as lightly as she could upon the dark hours of her
baby's coming, when she was doomed to pass through that Valley of the
Shadow far away from the protecting and comforting love of him whose
right it was by every law of Nature to have been, then of all times, by
her side; but the Boy felt the pathos of it, and his eyes filled with
tears. His mother--the mother of his dreams--his glorious
queen-mother--to suffer all this for him--for him!

And Father Paul!--his own father! What must this cross have been to him!
Surely he would love him all the rest of his life to make up for all
that suffering!

Then he thought of the other letters and he read them all, his heart
torn between grief and anger--for they told him all the appalling
details of the tragedy that had taken his mother from him, and left his
father and himself bereaved of all that made life dear and worth the
living to man and boy.

One of the letters was from Sir Paul, telling the story over again from
the man's point of view, and laying bare at last the great secret the
Boy had so often longed to hear. Nothing was kept back. Even every
note--every little scrap of his mother's writing--had been sacredly kept
and was now enclosed for the eyes of their son to read. The closed door
in Father Paul's life was unlocked now, and his son entered and
understood, wondering why he had been so blind that he had not seen it
all before. The writing on the wall had certainly been plain enough. And
he smiled to remember the readiness with which he had believed the
plausible story of Isabella Waring!

And that man--the husband of his mother--the king who had taken her dear
life from her with a curse upon his lips! Thank God he was not his
father! No, in all the world of men, there was no one but Paul
Verdayne--no one--to whom he would so willingly have given the
title--and to him he had given it in his heart long before.

He sat and read the letters through again, word by word, living in
imagination the l