“Here are your father's letters to my parents,” he began. “The letters will tell the whole story. They bear his signature. If you doubt their authenticity--if you think the name is forged, you can compare it to all the specimens of his writing in these old school-books of his. This is a diary he kept in college. You can see from its character how his life was tending. The letters are later, after he met your mother--a French girl--in New Orleans.” For a moment Nelson stared up into the withered face above him, and then, with a groan of dawning conviction, he took the letters. He opened the one on the top. How strange! The handwriting was not unlike his own. But that was too trivial to marvel over. It was the contents of the letter that at once benumbed and tore his heart in twain. _“Dear father and mother,” it began; “I am longing for the old home to-night; but, as you say, it is perhaps best that I should never come back again, especially as the facts are known in the neighborhood. The things you write me in regard to Annette's past are, alas! only too true. I don't deny them. Perhaps I'm the only one in the world who will overlook them, for I happen to know how she was tried by poverty and temptation when she was hardly more than a child. But on one point I can set your minds at rest. You seem to think that I intend to marry her; but I promise you now that I shall never link your honored name to hers. Really the poor girl doesn't wish it. She seems to understand how you feel exactly. And the baby! you are worried over its future. Let that go. As soon as the war is over, I shall do my full duty by it. It is nameless, as you say, and that fact may sting it later in life, but such things have happened before, and, my dear father and mother, young men have fallen into bad ways before, and--“_ Nelson Floyd read no further. Turning the time-stained sheet over, he saw his father's signature. With lifeless fingers he opened one or two of the other letters. He tried to glance at the fly-leaves of the books on his quivering knees, but there was a blur before his sight. The scrawny hands of the old man were stretched out to prevent the mass from falling to the floor. “Are you satisfied? That's the main thing,” he said. “Because, if you are not, there are plenty of legal records which--” “I am satisfied.” Nelson stood up, his inert hand on the back of the rocking-chair he had just vacated. “I was going to say if you are not I can give you further proof. I can cite to you old legal documents to which my brother signed his name. He got hard up and sold a piece of land to me once. I have that deed. You are welcome to--” “I am satisfied.” Those words seemed the only ones of which the young man's bewildered brain were capable. But he was a gentleman to the core of his being. “I'm sorry I intruded on you, Mr. Floyd. Only blind ignorance on my part--” He went no further.