"I am at your mercy, and I must submit." She suddenly looked up, and answered me with a flush on her kind and handsome old face.
"As God is my witness, child, I pity you from the bottom of my heart!" After that extraordinary outburst of feeling, she took up her work with one hand, and signed to me with the other to leave her.
I bowed to her in silence, and went out.
I had entered the house far from feeling sure of the course I ought to take in the future.

I left the house positively resolved, come what might of it, to discover the secret which the mother and son were hiding from me.

As to the question of the name, I saw it now in the light in which I ought to have seen it from the first.

If Mrs.Macallan _had_ been twice married (as I had rashly chosen to suppose), she would certainly have shown some signs of recognition when she heard me addressed by her first husband's name.

Where all else was mystery, there was no mystery here.