Loomis's papers. You found them, I conclude."

"Yes, I found them, papers, letters which told me——"

"Letters from your—from José Beltrán?"

"Yes. You have seen them?"

"I saw them a long time ago, when Mrs. Loomis first came to this place after her husband's death."

"And she brought me with her. Why did she conceal the fact that I was not her own child?"

"Because she meant to adopt you legally in place of the child she had lost, to give you a legal right to the name she bore. She always meant to do that, but, like many, many others, she deferred it from time to time. She had a feeling that if it were known by her husband's family you might not be treated with proper deference, and she was jealous for you. She hoped to live to see you well married, then the name would have made little difference. It was a wrong view which she took, but it came more from a natural disinclination to trouble herself about business than from any desire to harm you. I was able to persuade her to make a will in which she left you all that was her own."

Nancy was silent before she asked: "Would I have had more if I had been legally adopted?"

"Possibly; but we need not go into that now. The will was made long ago."

"Poor, dear mamma," sighed Nancy. "At first, Mr. Weed, I felt very bitterly toward her, as if she had done me a great wrong. I was very wicked to feel so, for I know she thought she was doing her best, and I have come to see that my feeling should be one of deep gratitude rather than of bitterness. She did so much for me, me, a poor little waif but it is a shock to know that my name is Anita Beltrán and not Nancy Loomis, to know little of my father and nothing of my own mother. Do you know anything more about me than is contained in those letters?"

"Nothing. I know only that you were deserted by your own mother; that your father, in political difficulties, was obliged to leave Mexico, that he went first to Cuba and then to New Orleans, where he died of fever; that Mrs. Loomis took you, at the time of your father's flight, brought you back with her from Mexico and reared you as her own."

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