“And that’s the whole story, sir?”

“Yes, Paul.”

Paul shook his head.

“The whole story, sir, except that what you did—my father didn’t. Therefore he lived and died an outcast,” and the young man’s voice died away in a whisper.

Colonel Vanderfelt turned back to him and laid his hand upon Paul’s shoulder and shook it in a gentle sympathy.

“There’s another question I would like to have answered,” said Paul. He was very pale, but his voice was firm again.

“Yes?”

“The disgrace, I suppose, killed my mother?”

“I have no right to say that.”

“The truth, sir, please!” and the appeal came so clearly from a man in the extremity of torture, that Colonel Vanderfelt could not but answer it.

“It did. She was in India when this shameful business happened. She came home and died.”

In a few moments Paul began to laugh. The laughter was pitched in a low key and horrible to hear; and there was such a flame of agony burning in the boy’s eyes and so dreadful a grin upon his white face that Colonel Vanderfelt feared for his reason.

“Steady, Paul, steady!” he said gently.

“I was thinking of the fine myth by which I explained everything to the honour of the family,” Paul cried in a bitter voice. “Our seclusion, the antagonism between my father and me, the change of name—it was all due to a morbid grief at the loss of a wife too deeply loved. That’s what I believed, sir,” he said wildly, but Colonel Vanderfelt had already learned of these delusions from Mr. Ferguson. “And shame’s the explanation. Disgrace is the explanation. He killed my mother with it and now the son too must hide!”

“No,” said Colonel Vanderfelt with decision. “There’s a good way out of this tangle for you, a way by which you may still reach all you have set your heart on—your career, your name and an honoured place amongst your own people.”

Paul lifted incredulous eyes to 

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