Not a muscle of his face moved. "Why that?" he asked.

"Because your name is Caryll," said she.

"My name?" he laughed softly and bitterly. "My name?" He reached for an
ebony cane that stood beside his chair. "I had thought you understood."
He heaved himself to his feet, and she forgot to caution him against
exertion. "I have no right to any name," he told her. "My father was a
man too full of worldly affairs to think of trifles. And so it befell
that before he went his ways he forgot to marry the poor lady who was
my mother. I might take what name I chose. I chose Caryll. But you will
understand, Mistress Winthrop," and he looked her fully in the face,
attempting in vain to dissemble the agony in his eyes--he who a little
while ago had been almost happy--"that if ever it should happen that
I should come to love a woman who is worthy of being loved, I who am
nameless have no name to offer her."

Revelation illumined her mind as in a flash. She looked at him.

"Was--was that what you meant, that day we thought you dying, when you
said to me--for it was to me you spoke, to me alone--that it was better
so?"

He inclined his head. "That is what I meant," he answered.

Her lids drooped; her cheeks were very white, and he remarked the swift,
agitated surge of her bosom, the fingers that were plucking at one
another in her lap. Without looking up, she spoke again. "If you had the
love to offer, what would the rest matter? What is a name that it should
weigh so much?"

"Heyday!" He sighed, and smiled very wistfully. "You are young, child.
In time you will understand what place the world assigns to such men as
I. It is a place I could ask no woman to share. Such as I am, could I
speak of love to any woman?"

"Yet you spoke of love once to me," she reminded him, scarcely above her
breath, and stabbed him with the recollection.

"In an hour of moonshine, an hour of madness, when I was a reckless fool
that must give tongue to every impulse. You reproved me then in just the
terms my case deserved. Hortensia," he bent towards her, leaning on
his cane, "'tis very sweet and merciful in you to recall it without
reproach. Recall it no more, save to think with scorn of the fleering
coxcomb who was so lost to the respect that is due to so sweet a lady. I
have told you so much of myself to-day that you may."

"Decidedly," came a shrill, ironical voice from the arbor's entrance,
"I may congratulate you, sir, upon the prodigious s