It was not without a tremor, it was not without a faster beating of the heart, that Kester took the bit of cracked looking-glass from the wall and held it to the woman’s lips. His very life seemed to stand still for a moment or two while he waited for the result. It came. The glass clouded faintly. The woman was not dead. With a muttered curse Kester dashed the glass across the floor and put back the candle on the chimney-piece. Then he took up his hat. Where was the use of staying longer? She could tell him nothing more when she should have come to her senses than she had told him already: nothing, that is, of any consequence; and as for details, he did not want them—at least, not now. What he had been told already held food enough for thought for some time to come. He paused for a moment before going out. Was it really possible—was it really credible, that that haggard, sharp-featured woman was his mother?—that his father had been a coarse, common labouring man, a mere hedger and ditcher, who had lived and died in that mean hut, and that he himself, instead of being the Kester St. George he had always believed himself to be, was no other than the son of those two—the boy whose supposed death he remembered to have heard about when little more than a mere child? Fiercely and savagely he told himself again and again that such a thing could not be—that what Mother Mim had told him was nothing more than a pack of devil’s lies—the invention of a brain weakened and distorted by illness and the clouds of coming death. It was high time to go. He put five sovereigns on the chimney-piece, went softly out, and shut the door behind him. The girl was sitting on the low mud-wall near the door, with the skirt of her dress drawn over her head as some protection from the bitter wind. Her black, glittering eyes took him in from head to foot as he walked up to her. “Go inside at once. She has fainted,” said Kester. The girl nodded and went. Then Kester mounted his horse and rode slowly homeward through the chilly twilight. Bitterest thoughts held him as with a vice. When he came within sight of the chimneys of Park Newton, he gave a sigh of relief, and put spurs to his horse. “That is mine, and no power on earth shall take it from me,” he muttered. “That and the money that comes with it. I am Kester St. George. Let those disprove who can!” A few nights later, as Lionel Dering was sitting in his dressing-room, smoking a last cigar before turning in, there came three low, distinct taps at the door, which he recognized as the peculiar signal of Dobbs. It was nearly an hour past midnight, and in that early household every one had been long abed, or, at least, had retired long ago to their own rooms. Lionel opened the door, and Dobbs slid softly in. Such visits were by no means infrequent, but they were usually paid at a somewhat earlier hour than on the present occasion. “Come in, Dobbs,” said Lionel. “You are later to-night than usual.”