warm home with some one to love, and to love me back... How should you feel if it were you; if any one had put a blank wall before _your_ life?" "As you do, dear--dazed and broken; worse, perhaps, for I should not take it so calmly. I should storm and rage." "Yes! You are _revoltee_. It doesn't help, Jean, or I would shriek with the best. There is only one thing which rouses my wrath--I ought to have known before. Aunt Mary thought it was kind to bring me up in ignorance. When I asked questions about my relations she put me off with generalities. I thought it was strange that so many of them had been invalids... I never could understand why I had not seen father for years before his death. When I was a child I took for granted that he had been abroad; later, I scented a mystery and was afraid to ask. I suffered tortures, Jean, puzzling over it at nights, trying to piece together scattered bits of information. I had terrible thoughts--the blackest thoughts. I had visions of him as a forger, shut up in a cell. When the bell rang late at night I used to tremble, wondering if it were he escaped from prison, coming to us for shelter... Then at the end, as so often happens, it came out just by chance. Some people were sitting behind a screen at a reception, and they spoke of me--just a few words, and before I could move I had heard the great secret. `Interesting-looking girl! It is to be hoped she won't go mad, too. So many of that family--' It was like a flashlight over the past. I looked back, and understood. All the bits fitted, and the mystery was solved. I was not the daughter of a criminal--only of a maniac, who had been shut up for five years before his death. That was my grandmother's mysterious illness, and Aunt Bertha's too--pretty Aunt Bertha, who disappeared for a year at a time, for a `cure,' and came back looking so worn and sad. That was the explanation of my boy cousin's violent temper, and of the misery of his father and mother after each explosion. And I, arrogant young schoolgirl, used to criticise their weakness, and expatiate on the firmness with which I should bring up my own children, and Aunt Mary would look at me so wistfully over the top of her spectacles. Heigho! Well, then I _knew_, and after that I could not rest. I grew nervous about myself; I got into the habit of watching myself, as it were--waiting for danger-signals, for symptoms. I had sense enough left to know that that was the best way to develop all that I dreaded, and this last year I have been waiting for a chance to consult a specialist and thrash out the question, I could not leave Aunt Mary while she was so ill; after her death there was so much to be arranged; now at last I've had my interview, and this is the result, Jean, is it strange? I never once thought of this verdict. It seemed the right and the wise thing to take skilled advice, but what I expected was to be soothed and reassured. Aunt Mary always laid such emphasis on