care to know anything about it. I don't think the ladies would like you
to tell. They are very proud of having kept so quiet out of respect to
her father's wishes. If Parke Alden had wanted to learn anything, he
could have done it years ago."

"But I tell you he doesn't know there's anything to learn." And the
Michigan lady's voice was as snappy as the place she came from. "I know
Dr. Alden well," she went on. "He's operated on me twice, and I've spent
weeks in his hospital. When he tells me it's best for my head to come
off--off my head is to come. And when a man can make people feel that
way about him, he isn't the kind that's not square on four sides.

"I tell you, he doesn't know about this child. He's often talked to me
about Yorkburg, knowing you were my cousin. He told me of his sister
running away with an actor and marrying him, and dying a year later.
Also of his father's death and the sale of the old home, and of many
other things. There's no place on earth he loves as he does Virginia. He
doesn't come back because there's no one to come to see specially. No
real close kin, I mean. The changes in the place where you were born
make a man lonelier than a strange city does, and something seems to
keep him away."

"You say he doesn't know his sister left a child?" Mrs. Moon put down
the needle she was trying to thread, and stuck it in her work. "Why
doesn't he know?"

"Why should he? Who was there to tell him, if a bunch of women made up
their minds he shouldn't know? He wrote to his sister again and again,
but whether his letters ever reached her he never knew. He thinks not,
as it was unlike her not to write if they were received.

"Travelling from place to place with her actor husband, who, he said,
was a 'younger son Englishman,' the letters probably miscarried, and not
for months after her death did he know she was dead."

"We didn't, either," interrupted Mrs. Moon. "In fact, we heard it
through Parke, who went West after his father's death. He wrote Roy
Wright, telling him about it."

"Who is Roy Wright, and where is he, that he didn't tell Dr. Alden about
the child?"

"Oh, Roy's dead. I believe Mary Alden's marriage broke Roy's heart;
that is, if a man's heart can be broken. He had been in love with her
all her life. Not just loved her, but in love with her. His house was
next to the Aldens', where the Reagans now live, and Major Alden and
General Wright were old friends, each anxious for the mat