furniture, just as he had changed his name and abode. It was part of the process of destroying all his associations with the country and people of his birth. Only—his recollections had revealed something new to him—and disquietingly significant.

“Why were those who came to buy unfriendly and contemptuous?” he asked slowly.

“Are you sure that they were?” Phyllis returned. But she did not look at Paul’s face and her voice was a little unsteady.

“I am very sure about that,” said Paul. “A woman was with me, holding my hand. She led me away—yes—I was frightened by those noisy, jeering people, and she led me away. It was my nurse, I suppose. For my mother was dead.”

“Yes,” replied Phyllis, and then, not knowing how hard she struck, she added, “Your mother had died a couple of months before the sale.”

Paul Ravenel, during the last days, had been schooling himself to a reserve of manner, but this statement, as of a thing well known which he too must be supposed to know, loosened all his armour. A startled cry burst from his lips.

“What’s that?” he exclaimed, and with a frightened glance at his white face Phyllis repeated her words.

“I thought you knew,” she added.

“No.”

Paul walked a little apart. One of the garden paths was bordered by some arches of roses. He stood by them, plucking at one or two of the flowers and seeing none of them at all. The keystone of the explanation which he had built in order to account for and uphold his father was down now and with it the whole edifice. It had all depended upon the idea of a passionate, enduring love in his father’s heart for the wife who had died in giving birth to her son, the enemy. And in that idea there was no truth at all!

Paul reflected now in bitterness that there never had been any reason why he should have held his belief—any wild outburst from Monsieur Ravenel, any word of tender remembrance. He had got his illusion—yes, he reached the truth now in this old garden—from an instinct to preserve himself from hating that stranger with whom he lived and on whom he depended for his food and the necessities of his life. He turned suddenly back to Phyllis Vanderfelt.

“What I don’t understand, Miss Phyllis, is how it is that remembering so much of other things here, I can remember nothing 

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