n rose up and began to
move towards the door backwards, keeping an eye upon him. Her thought
showed clear to the detective: she had been entertaining a lunatic. He
laughed.

"Don't go," he said. "I know what you imagine, but I'm no lunatic. I
don't believe that your son is an impostor. He is a friend of mine, and
I know that he is Arthur Dillon. But a man in my business must do as he
is ordered by his employers. I am a detective."

For a minute she hesitated with hand outstretched to the bell-rope. Her
mind acted with speed; she had nothing to fear, the man was friendly,
his purpose had failed, whatever it was, the more he talked the more she
would learn, and it might be in her power to avert danger by policy. She
went back to her seat, having left it only to act her part. Taking the
hint provided by Curran, she pretended belief in his insanity, and
passed to indignation at this attempt upon her happiness, her
motherhood. This rage became real, when she reflected that the Aladdin
palace of her life was really threatened by Curran's employers. To her
the prosperity and luxury of the past five years had always been
dream-like in its fabric, woven of the mists of morning, a fairy
enchantment, which might vanish in an hour and leave poor Cinderella
sitting on a pumpkin by the roadside, the sport of enemies, the burden
of friends. How near she had been to this public humiliation! What
wretches, these people who employed the detective!

"My dear boy was absent ten years," she said, "and I suffered agony all
that time. What hearts must some people have to wish to put me through
another time like that! Couldn't any wan see that I accepted him as my
son? that all the neighbors accepted him? What could a man want to
deceive a poor mother so? I had nothing to give him but the love of a
mother, and men care little for that, wild boys care nothing for it. He
brought me a fortune, and has made my life beautiful ever since he came
back. I had nothing to give him. Who is at the bottom of this thing?"

The detective explained the existence and motives of a deserted,
poverty-stricken wife and child.

"I knew a woman would be at the bottom of it," she exclaimed viciously,
feeling against Sonia a hatred which she knew to be unjust. "Well, isn't
she able to recognize her own husband? If I could tell my son after ten
years, when he had grown to be a man, can't she tell her own husband
after a few years? Could it be that my boy played Ho