It was the likeness of a man, very fairly done, who wore a uniform and cravat of the time of the death of King Charles I. Lord Grey looked at it quickly. “It is your Grace,” he said; then, seeing the dress–“No,” he added, and glanced swiftly at Monmouth–“who is it?” “It is Colonel Sidney taken in his youth,” I said, for I had known the man well in Rotterdam when he was attached to the court of the late King Charles, then in exile there. And I gazed at the painting … it was a marvellous fair face. While I looked my lord Duke had three letters out from the same secret corner of his book, and I saw that two were in the writing of Colonel Sidney and the third in a hand I did not know, the hand of an ill-educated woman. “Who is this?” asked Lord Grey with an amazed look. “Surely Colonel Sidney was never any concern of your Grace?” He stood with the picture in his hand and Monmouth looked up at him from the old worn and folded letters he was smoothing out. “It is Colonel Sidney,” he said. “Well?” asked Lord Grey intently. “He was my father,” said Monmouth; then he began laughing again, and it had the most doleful sound of anything I have ever heard. I could not grasp what had been said, but my lord Grey with his quick comprehension seemed in a moment to understand and value this truth. “Your father!” he said softly, and added: “To think we never saw it!” which was an extraordinary thing to say; yet, on looking at the likeness in little and on the fair agonised face staring across the candlelight one might notice that they were in almost every detail the same, and methought I was a very fool never to have observed before how these two men were alike, even to little manners and fashions of speech. And being that I saw the tragic pitifulness of it all, I could do no more than laugh dismally also. “See you these letters if you want proof,” said Monmouth. “There is no need,” answered my lord Grey. “The likeness is enough.” Then he repeated: “And we never saw it!” “No,” said his Grace half-fiercely; “you never saw it–I was always the King’s son to you–instead of that I am scarce a gentleman.… Now you know why I cannot go on.… I am no Stewart, I have no royal blood.…” Grey looked at him, turning over in his mind, I think, the aspects of this bewildering turn; he gazed at Colonel Sidney’s son with a curiosity almost cruel. I was thinking of the obscurity from which he had sprung, the mystery round his early years in Rotterdam, his sudden appearance in a blaze of glory at Whitehall when the King had made him Duke.… “Who did this?” I asked. “And who kept silence?” “King Charles loved me as his son,” he answered vaguely, “and I loved him.… I could not have told him–and I was ambitious. What would you have done?” he cried. “I did not know until I was fourteen.” He pressed his hand to his breast. “But I will not die for it,” he muttered. “Why should I die for it?” “Your death must become your life, not your birth,” said Lord Grey.