"I've told you what I think. He's heard you call me Nell. Tom, too, called me Nell. That may have given him the hint. Then he simply opened Iona Allen's letter and read it. Something was in it, no doubt, that enabled him to put two and two together. Perhaps the name Bewick. Iona would have heard of that. She would write to say now I'd climbed out of poverty and hard work she knew I wouldn't mind lending a hand to an old friend not so fortunate. Something like that. She'd be sure to whine and beg. And Charlie Hunt, little bunch of meanness! would imagine he could hold over me the fact that I was poor once and what he would think low in the scale, because he thought I'd be ashamed of it. But no such thing. If I changed my name coming here, it wasn't on any such account as that. I'm gladder than ever now that I told Mrs. Foss all about it. I did, Gerald, quite soon after we first came, and she said, though it was in a way a mistake, she didn't see any real harm in it. As long as I'd begun that way, she said, better not make a sensation by changing back or saying anything about it. She thought my reasons were very natural. It wasn't as if I were misleading anybody, or anybody were losing money by me. I'd have told you too, Gerald, in a minute, as far as wanting just to conceal anything goes. But Gerald and I"--she seemed to place the matter before an invisible judge and jury--"never talk together of ugly things, do we, Gerald? He's more delicate-minded by a good deal than I am. With him particularly, though we've been such intimate friends, I shrank from it. There's not much poetry about me, I know that, but there'd be even less if I had to have it known all I've been through. And since the first of our association we've always lived in a sweet sort of world, haven't we, Gerald? I'd be ready, just the same, to tell you the whole story any moment you wanted to hear...."