She paused and looked at Tom Lupton expectantly, as if waiting to be prompted further. And indeed, this may subconsciously have been her need of him. It was not so much that she needed his advice and counsel, in all likelihood, as that she needed someone who by a listening presence and by an occasional question or comment would help her to think the thing out and reach and record a clear conclusion. Her friend may have been aware of this. At any rate, he said: “Poor old Guy! I don’t think he’s to blame, do you?” For an instant she was horrified by a conjecture. “You don’t mean that you think he was not himself? That he was--out of his mind or anything like that?” The man hastily disclaimed any such idea. “I only meant,” he said, “that the person who is to blame is that old beast who brought him up.” At this reference to Captain Buel Vanton she shuddered slightly, then said: “Yes, of course. But that would be a hopeful augury. Jacob King disappeared and Captain Vanton turned up in Blue Port. It was as if Dr. Jekyll had triumphed over Mr. Hyde.” “I’d hardly call Captain Vanton a Dr. Jekyll,” Tom Lupton dissented. Mary Vanton went on: “I think my husband wanted to remove from our children’s lives any trace of the darkness in which he himself grew up. He had, as you know, his moods of profound dejection, never lasting, but liable to make us all unhappy with the sense of something that could not be shaken off. It wasn’t his fault. Had the children been older it would not have mattered so much. But, as you know, they all worshipped him.” With the idea of helping her past this obstacle the man said: “You have made up your mind what you will tell them--the children?” She made a sound of assent. “To John, the oldest, I shall tell part of the whole story. I shall tell him of his father’s boyhood and of Captain Vanton’s life here in Blue Port; I shall simply tell him that Captain Vanton was an insane man whose idea was that the world was so full of wickedness that no boy of his could be trusted in it; and so he kept his boy tied closely to a dreary old house with two old persons in it, the one always sick, the other insane. I shall tell him--John--that his father has never got over that experience, that the memory of it was what made him so unhappy from time to time, that he realized that these spells made everybody about him unhappy and worried. Then I shall tell John that his father, unable to overcome these feelings, has simply gone away. I shall tell the boy that we may never see him again, that he may come back some day entirely recovered and well and cheerful, or that we may see him return ill and old and unhappier than ever. “That much I can say to my oldest; but I can and I shall say much more, and of greater importance. I want to impress upon him that he _is_ the oldest and that I now have no one nearly related to me upon whom I can depend except himself. He must be as much of a man for my sake as he has it in him to be.