rooms at the two ends of the house already! That was never the way with
Miriam and me. Can you remember such a thing, Ma Cheri?"

"It--it is the baby," gasped Josephine, backing from the light to hide
the wild rush of blood to her face. "Philip cannot sleep," she finished
desperately.

"Then I disapprove of his nerves," rejoined her father. "Good-night,
Philip, my boy!"

"Good-night!" said Philip.

He was looking at Adare's wife as they moved away. In the dim light of
the hall a strange look had come into her face at her husband's jesting
words. Was it the effect of the shadows, or had he seen her
start--almost as if for an instant she had been threatened by a blow?
Was it imagination, or had he in that same instant caught a sudden look
of alarm, of terror, in her eyes? Josephine had told him that her
mother knew nothing of the tragedy of the child's birth. If this were
so, why had she betrayed the emotions which Philip was sure he had seen?

A chaotic tangle of questions and of doubts rushed through his mind.
John Adare alone had acted a natural and unrestrained part in the brief
space that had intervened since his home-coming. Philip had looked upon
the big man's love and happiness, his worship of the woman who was his
wife, his ecstasy over the baby, his affection for Josephine, and it
seemed to him that he KNEW this man now. The few moments he had stood
in the room with mother and daughter had puzzled him most. In their
faces he had seen no sign of gladness at their reunion, and he asked
himself if Josephine had told him all the truth--if her mother were
not, after all, a partner to her secret.

And then there swept upon him in all its overwhelming cloud of mystery
that other question which until now he had not dared to ask himself:
HAD JOSEPHINE HERSELF TOLD HIM ALL THE TRUTH? He did not dare to tell
himself that it was possible that she was NOT the mother of the child
which she had told him was her own. And yet he could not kill the
whispering doubt deep back in his brain. It had come to him in the
room, quick as a flashlight, when she had made her confession; it was
insistent now as he stood looking at the closed door through which they
had disappeared.

For him to believe wholly and unquestioned Josephine's confession was
like asking him to believe that da Vinci's masterpiece hanging in the
big room had been painted by a blind man. In her he had embodied all
that he had ever dreamed of as pure and beau