sat back
breathless.

"Astor Street," he read the marker on the corner a block back from the
lake, and he bent quickly forward to look, as the car swung to the
right into Astor Street. It was--as in this neighborhood it must be--a
residence street of handsome mansions built close together. The car
swerved to the east curb about the middle of the block and came to a
stop. The house before which it had halted was a large stone house of
quiet, good design; it was some generation older, apparently, than the
houses on each side of it which were brick and terra cotta of recent,
fashionable architecture; Alan only glanced at them long enough to get
that impression before he opened the cab door and got out; but as the
cab drove away, he stood beside his suitcase looking up at the old
house which bore the number given in Benjamin Corvet's letter, then
around at the other houses and back to that again.

The neighborhood obviously precluded the probability of Corvet's being
merely a lawyer--a go-between. He must be some relative; the question
ever present in Alan's thought since the receipt of the letter, but
held in abeyance, as to the possibility and nearness of Corvet's
relation to him, took sharper and more exact form now than he had dared
to let it take before. Was his relationship to Corvet, perhaps, the
closest of all relationships? Was Corvet his ... father? He checked
the question within himself, for the time had passed for mere
speculation upon it now. Alan was trembling excitedly; for--whoever
Corvet might be--the enigma of Alan's existence was going to be
answered when he had entered that house. He was going to know who he
was. All the possibilities, the responsibilities, the attachments, the
opportunities, perhaps, of that person whom he was--but whom, as yet,
he did not know--were before him.

He half expected the heavy, glassless door at the top of the stone
steps to be opened by some one coming out to greet him, as he took up
his suitcase; but the gray house, like the brighter mansions on both
sides of it, remained impassive. If any one in that house had observed
his coming, no sign was given. He went up the steps and, with fingers
excitedly unsteady, he pushed the bell beside the door.

The door opened almost instantly--so quickly after the ring, indeed,
that Alan, with leaping throb of his heart, knew that some one must
have been awaiting him. But the door opened only halfway, and the man
who s