“Do you think that they were legally married? Did you never see or hear anything while you lived with them, to make you suspect that they might not be husband and wife? It is a hard question for a son to ask, but the secrecy, with which my father has seemed to hedge himself about, has led me to fear that there was some grave reason why he could not, or would not, have me with him and openly recognize me. Why was he unwilling to have you use his name if you had occasion to write to him, but instead gave you a blind address, which no one could recognize, and to which, doubtless, he alone had the key?” “Good lord, Master Geoffrey, never have any such thoughts entered my head before!” Margery exclaimed, in a tone of startled amazement. “I never saw a man fonder of his wife than Captain Dale was of your mother; and he had reason to be fond of her, too, for she worshiped the very air he breathed, and was always so sweet and merry that a man would have been a brute not to have loved her. But——” “Well?” queried Geoffrey, eagerly, the hot blood surging to his brow, with a feeling of dread, as she stopped, a note of sudden conviction in her tone. “Well, I do remember, once, that she did not seem quite happy, but I have never given it a second thought until now,” Margery said, reflectively. “Tell me about it,” the young man commanded, briefly. “They had been out for a walk one night after tea, and it was quite dark when they returned. They stopped a moment on the steps, before coming in, and I was at an open window up stairs just above them. Your mother had been crying—I could tell by the sound of her voice—all at once she turned and threw her arms around the captain’s neck and sobbed: “‘Oh, Will, I wish you would, for my sake and—for our baby’s sake.’ “‘I will, my darling,’ the captain told her, ‘it shall be done just as soon as I can turn myself, but it would ruin me to do it now. Have patience, my pet, and it will be all right in a few months more, at the furthest.’ “She didn’t say another word, only uttered a tired kind of sigh, kissed him softly, and then they went in. But I never thought much about it afterward. I didn’t know but what she had been coaxing him to leave the mines and go back to where they came from, for I’m sure it couldn’t have been nice for her to live there where there wasn’t hardly another woman fit to associate with her,” Margery concluded, thoughtfully. But Geoffrey believed his gentle mother had been asking for something far more important than a change of residence; that would have been of comparatively little consequence to her, loving his father as she did. He imagined that she had been pleading to be recognized as Captain Dale’s lawful wife, so that her child might have honorable birth. He sighed heavily, for the farther he went in his search the darker and more perplexing grew the way. CHAPTER XXX. A STARTLING RECOGNITION.