The first words he saw were: "Why did you not tell me that my boy, my baby Harry, was not your only child, and that your eldest son was alive ?" So that was it, after all.

Even his mother knew.

Master of his nerves as he was, it blinded him for a moment.

Presently he read on--the whole page--and lingered upon the words, that he might have time to think what he must say to Hylda.

Nothing of the tragedy of his mother touched him, though he was faintly conscious of a revelation of a woman he had never known, whose hungering caresses had made him, as a child, rather peevish, when a fit of affection was not on him.