He looked up then, and the two women could see that he flinched.

"Well,--I don't know how to say it, but you must know it." He stopped,
and they saw anguish in his face. "But I--Laura," he turned to the
younger woman and made a pitiful gesture with his whole hand, "do you
remember back when you were a girl away at school and I stopped writing
to you?"

"Yes, Grant," replied Laura, "so well--so well, and you never would
say--"

"Because I had no right to," he cut in, "it was not my secret--to
tell--then."

Mrs. Nesbit sat impatiently on her chair edge, as one waiting for a
foolish formality to pass. She looked at the clumsy, bulky figure of a
man in his ill-fitting Sunday clothes, and obviously was rather
irritated at his ill-timed interjection of his own childhood affair into
an entirely simple problem of true love running smoothly. But her
daughter, seeing the anguish in the man's twisted face, was stricken
with a terror in her heart. Laura knew that no light emotion had
grappled him, and when her mother said, "Well?" sharply, the daughter
rose and went to him, touching his hand gently that had been gripping
the chair-back. She said, "Yes, Grant, but why do you have to tell it
now?"

"Because," he answered passionately, "you should know, and Lila should
know and your mother should know. Your father and I and my father all
think so."

Mrs. Nesbit sat back further in her chair. Her face showed anxiety. She
looked at the two others and when Laura's eyes met her mother's, there
was a warning in the daughter's glance which kept her mother silent.

"Grant," said Laura, as she stood beside the gaunt figure, on which a
mantle of shame seemed to be falling, "there is nothing in the world
that should be hard for you to tell me--or mother."

"It isn't you," he returned, and then lifting his face and trying to
catch the elder woman's eyes, he said slowly:

"Mrs. Nesbit--I'm Kenyon's father."

He caught Laura's hand in his own, and held her from stepping back.
Laura did not speak. Mrs. Nesbit gazed blankly at the two and in the
silence the little mantel clock ticked into their consciousnesses.
Finally the elder woman, who had grown white as some old suspicion or
fatal recollection flashed through her mind, asked in an unsteady voice:
"And his mother?"

"His mother was Margaret Mueller, Mrs. Nesbit," answered the man.

Then anger glowed in the white face as Mrs. Nesbit rose and stepped
toward the downcast man. "Do