He looked down at the fire, resting his hand on the chimney-piece. At last she said: “We might modify it a little;” and he moved his face, his eyes searching the obscurity in which she stood, only one of her hands catching the glow from the fire. “I cannot modify anything,” he said. “There must be a marriage, by what recognized rite you like, but--that.” Her voice remained as level as his, expressing none of the longing, the wistfulness, that were in her whole being. “Nobody knew about mother,” she said. “Nobody seems to have got to know now.” “And you mean,” he said, “that now you consent to letting nobody know it about you?” “You did succeed,” she evaded him, “in concealing it about mother. It was splendid of you! At the time I thought it wasn’t possible. I don’t know how you managed it. I suppose nobody knows about it but you and me and Ellida and Pauline.” “You mean,” he pursued relentlessly, “you mean that now you consent to letting nobody know it about you? Of course, besides us, my solicitor knows--of your mother.” “At the first shock,” she said, “I thought that the whole world must know, and so I was determined that the whole world should know that I hadn’t deserted her memory....” She paused for a wistful moment, whilst inflexibly he reflected over the coals. “Have you,” she said, “the slightest inkling of why she did it?” He shook his head slowly; he sighed. “Of course I couldn’t take you even on those terms--that nobody knew,” he said, with his eyes still averted. Then he turned upon her, swarthy, his face illumined with a red glow. The slow mournfulness of their speeches, the warmth, the shadow, kept him silent for a long time. “No,” he said at last, “there isn’t a trace of a fact to be found. I’m as much in the dark as I was on that day when we parted. I’m not as stunned, but I’m just as mystified.” “Ah!” she said, “but what did you feel--then?” “Did you ever realize,” he asked, “how the shock came to me? You remember old Partington, with the grey beard? He asked me to call on them. He sat on the opposite side of his table. He handed me the copy of some notes your father had made for their instructions as to his will. It was quite short. It ran: ‘You are to consider that my wife and I were never married. I desire you to frame a will so phrased that my entire estate, real and personal, should devolve upon my two daughters, Ellida and Katharine, without revealing the fact that they are illegitimate. This should not be difficult, since their mother’s name, which they are legally entitled to bear, was the same as my own, she having been my cousin.’” Grimshaw broke off his low monologue to gaze again at her, when he once more returned his eyes to the coals. “You understand,” he said, “what that meant to me. It was handed to me without a word; and after a long time Partington said: f You understand that you are your uncle’s heir-at-law--nothing more.” Katya whispered: “Poor old Toto!”