Sandy had wondered but had restrained his curiosity. He looked now at the big, handsome fellow and again was seized with the sense of chill that he had felt in the afternoon. "It sounds like a fairy story--a best seller or what you will. By and by"--he glanced at Martin as though to suggest a time when he would be absent--"I've got a lot to tell you, but something turned turtle in my affairs and got on to my nerves. Aunt Olive made me consult Doctor Travers, he's my uncle's pet aversion, you know, because he wanted Aunt Matilda to go into his sanatorium and Uncle Levi considered it an insult. Well, I saw Travers and he advised a vacation. 'Get to the hills,' he suggested, 'and browse a bit. Why don't you go up to that place--a hole in the ground,' he called it, 'where your uncle has sent--Morley?' And then it all came out, and by Jove! I found out that you hailed from the place of my forefathers!" At this Martin dropped his pipe on the hearth and fixed his dim eyes on the stranger's face. Back rolled the years that had been but stagnant pools in poor Martin Morley's life; into focus came the simple hates and injustices that had brought him where he was. "Your--forefathers!" he gasped, while a weird familiarity and resemblance to--he knew not what--made Treadwell something tangible and actual at last. "Yes. We still own a good bit of land over beyond the place called The Forge. I've been having a look at it. It's run wild and rank, but it might be reclaimed, I suppose. There is a depraved old squatter on the place; lives in an old smoke-house. He actually remembered my grandfather and what do you think, Morley"--Lans had turned his back upon Martin, whose fixed stare and rigid pose disturbed him--"the old codger actually told me half of a story the other half of which Aunt Olive and I have often laughed over. Oddly enough it is a new and another connecting link between you and me. We're throw-backs, old fellow! Throw-backs and neither of us realizing it, but just naturally coming together." Sandy was looking at his father. Martin was pale and haggard and his bony hands clutched his thin knees until the knuckles were strained and white. "Hertford!" whispered Martin; "Hertford!"