ances!" I answered him excitedly, and we all piled out into
the hall and peered down its long vista.

Down one of the dimly illumined angles of the great stairway a white
figure darted, then paused, abashed, crouching back against the wall at
sight of us advancing. Above her sounded a man's voice, and even as she
screamed again, he overtook her, clasping her arm.

"Frances--dear, dear Frances!" he cried. "Are you afraid of _me_?"

And he threw his arms around her. "Come on back, dearest!" he pleaded.
"You have been dreaming."

And under the light of a great red cluster of grapes, pendent from the
mouth of a grinning Bacchus, I recognized with horror the yellow mat of
hair and freckled face of Billings' cub brother. On the instant, with a
bull-like roar, Billings sprang forward, but I was quicker still. But
fleeter than either of us to reach the scene were the two elderly men,
together with Miss Warfield, the housekeeper, and a couple of the maids.
Frances darted like a bird to Foxy Grandpa, and then the figures of the
women shut her from view.

Billings and I had paused, half-way to the landing. It looked as though
the elder Billings was amply capable of handling the occasion now. He
had backed the youth against the wall behind, and his language was of a
kind I hated to have my darling hear. Every time the other offered to
expostulate, his father broke out again.

"You are a disgrace to an honored name!" he roared. "And the only
explanation left for me to offer our guests is that you are drunk and
don't know where you are!"

"Oh, father!" faltered the boy. And then he turned his black shrouded
figure to the pale marble against which he leaned, and it seemed to me
his very heart would sob away.

"What's the matter, dad?" came a voice from the head of the stairway.
"What in thunder is all the row about?"

"By George!" gasped Billings. Everybody looked upward--one of the women
screamed. For there, slowly advancing down the angle leading to the
landing, his yellow mop of hair shining above the dark collar of a
dressing-robe, was the duplicate of the youth cowering under the elder
Billings' wrath.

And out of a dead, tense silence, came his voice again:

"Can't any of you speak?" He touched the figure on the shoulder. "Who
are you?" he asked in an odd, strained voice.

The black figure turned toward him a face agonized in grief.

"I--I don't know," came a voice pitifully--his voice, it seemed.

The cub just