water, that awful power its own. 

 Alan choked and gasped for breath, his pulses pounding in his throat; he had snatched off his hat and, leaning out of the window sucked the lake air into his lungs. There had been nothing to make him expect this overwhelming crush of feeling. The lake—he had thought of it, of course, as a great body of water, an interesting sight for a prairie boy to see; that was all. No physical experience in all his memory had affected him like this; and it was without warning; the strange thing that had stirred within him as the car brought him to the drive down-town was strengthened now a thousand-fold; it amazed, half frightened, half dizzied him. Now, as the motor suddenly swung around a corner and shut the sight of the lake from him, Alan 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. 

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