the enemy who had won. No wonder he couldn’t endure me, if with her death his whole world went dark. And everything else follows, doesn’t it? His friends came to mean—not nothing at all, but an actual annoyance, an encroachment on his grief. He shut himself up far away in a little town where no one knew him, and brooded over his loss. And men who do that become extravagant, don’t they, and lose their perspective, and do far-fetched, unreasonable things. Thus, my mother was French. So in a sort of distorted tribute to her memory, he changed his own nationality and took hers, and with it her name, and cut himself completely off from all his old world—a sort of monk of Love!”

Mr. Ferguson listened to the boy’s speech, which was delivered with a good deal of hesitation, without changing a muscle of his face. So this was why Paul could elate with a laugh the flight from the man with the medals and the lighted courtyard of the Guildhall. This was what he believed! Well, it was the explanation which a boy ignorant of life, nursed by dreams and poetry and loneliness and eager to believe the world a place of sunlight and high thoughts, might easily have conceived.

“Isn’t that the explanation, Mr. Ferguson?” Paul asked; and Mr. Ferguson replied without the twitch of a muscle:

“Absolutely! I did not think that you could have understood your father’s reticence so thoroughly.”

If one must do a thing, to do it with an air is the best way to carry conviction, thought Mr. Ferguson, and he rose from his chair with a deep relief. The interview was over, his visitor obviously satisfied, he could shake him by the hand and after all catch his train to Goring.

Mr. Ferguson’s relief, however, was premature. For the younger man cried:

“Good! For now the way is clear for me, and I can ask you for your professional help.”

“Oh!” said the lawyer doubtfully. “I didn’t understand that you came as a client. I am not very sure that we can undertake much more than we have upon our hands.”

“It’s not so much more, Mr. Ferguson.”

“I must be the judge of that. Let me hear what it is that you wish.”

“I wish to resume my own real nationality,” said Paul. “I am of my race. I want the name of it, too.”

Paul was of his race. It was not merely the long-legged build of him, nor the cut of his clothes, nor the make of his shoes, but a 

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