t spent itself. Nevertheless this suspense tried him.
He grew impatient.

"Damaris," he said, at last, "speak to me."

"How can I speak to you when I don't understand," she answered gravely.
"Either you lie--which I should be sorry to accuse you of doing--or you
tell me a very terrible thing, if, that is, I at all comprehend what you
say.--Are you not the son of Mrs. Faircloth, who lives at the inn out by
the black cottages?"

"Yes, Lesbia Faircloth is my mother. And I ask for no better. She has
squandered love upon me--squandered money, upon me too; but wisely and
cleverly, with results. Still--" he paused--"well, it takes two,
doesn't it, to make a man? One isn't one's mother's son only."

"But Mrs. Faircloth is a widow," Damaris reasoned, in wondering
directness. "I have heard people speak of her husband. She was married."

"But not to my father. Do you ask for proofs--just think a minute. Whom
did you mistake me for when I called you and came down over the Bar in
the dusk?"

"No--no--" she protested trembling exceedingly. "That is not possible.
How could such a thing happen?"

"As such things mostly do happen. It is not the first case, nor will it
by a long way, I reckon, be the last. They were young, and--mayn't we
allow--they were beautiful. That's often a good deal to do with these
accidents. They met and, God help them, they loved."

"No--no--" Damaris cried again.

Yet she kept her hands on Faircloth's shoulders, clinging to him in the
excessive travail of her innocent spirit--though he racked her--for
sympathy and for help.

"For whom, after all, did you take me?" he repeated. "If there wasn't
considerable cause it would be incredible you should make such a mistake.
Can you deny that I am hall-marked, that the fact of my parentage is
written large in my flesh?"

He felt her eyes fixed on him, painfully straining to see him through the
rain and darkness; and, when she spoke again, he knew she knew that he
did not lie.

"But wasn't it wrong" she said.

"I suppose so. Only as it gave me life and as I love life I'm hardly the
person to deliver an unbiased opinion on that point."

"Then you are not sad, you are not angry?" Damaris presently and rather
unexpectedly asked.

"Yes--at times both, but not often or for long together. As I tell you I
love life--love it too well to torment myself much about the manner of my
coming by it. It might show more refinement of feeling perhaps to hang my
head a