ot mean to frighten you!" he interjected. "I only followed
an impulse."

"Yes, one of your impulses, Jack," she remarked, comprehendingly. "Father
and I have been so much together--indeed, we have never been apart--that
there is more than filial sympathy of feeling between us. There is
something akin to telepathy. We often divine each other's thoughts. I
think that he understood what had taken place between us on the pass;
that you had brought on some sort of a crisis in our relations. It was
then that he told me who you were, as you know. Then he talked of you and
your father--you still wish to hear?"

"Yes!"

"And you will listen in silence?"

"Yes!"

"I will grant your defence of your father, but you will not argue? I am
giving what you ask, in justice to myself; I am giving my reasons, my
feelings."

"No, I will not argue."

Their tones were so low that a passer-by would have hardly been conscious
that they were talking; but had the passer-by caught the pitch he might
have hazarded many guesses, every one serious.

"Then, I will try to make clear all that father said. You were the image
of your father--a smile and a square chin. The smile could charm and the
chin could kill. He liked you for some things that seemed to spring from
another source, as he called it; but these would vanish and in the end
you would be like your father, as he knew when he saw you break Pedro
Nogales's arm. And you gloried in your strength; as you told me on the
pass and as I saw for myself in the duel. And to you, father said,
victory was the supreme guerdon of life. It ran triumphant and
inextinguishable in your veins."

"I--" he said, chokingly; but remembered his promise not to argue.

"Any opposition, any refusal excited your will to overcome it in the
sheer joy of the exercise of your strength. This had been your father's
story in everything, even in his marriage."

She paused.

"There is nothing more? No further light on his old relations with my
father and mother?" he asked.

"Only a single exclamation, 'It's not in the blood for you to believe in
Jack Wingfield, Mary!' And after that he turned silent and moody. I
pressed him for reasons. He answered that he had told me enough. I had to
live my own life; the rest I must decide for myself. I knew that I was
hurting him sorely. I was striking home into that past about which he
would never speak, though I know it still causes him many days of
suffering."

"But on th