“Do I know his name?--bless me! you must think us queer folks--as well as I know my own. He’s Mr Burton, and the house is Hillhead. You’ll maybe know the gentleman?” “I think--my husband knows him,” Madeline said. To find that there was no concealment,--that the man who had disappeared so strangely was living here in perfect unblemished respectability and security, with no mystery about him, increased in the most curious way the excitement of the discovery. But there arose, at this point, a remarkable difference between the young pair. For Madeline, bewildered by the thought of the unsuspected domestic establishment, did all she could to convince her husband that to go away and take no notice was the kindest and best thing to do. “You can write,” she said. “It would embarrass him to see you. He would have to explain. Gervase, don’t disturb the seclusion he has chosen.” She grew quite warm upon this subject, with an uneasy look in her eyes. “There is no reason why he should be embarrassed. I am not his judge. But I must see him,” Gervase said. They spent a disturbed and anxious night, so disturbed by the strange discovery, so startled by the circumstances, that neither slept much. And in the morning, notwithstanding Madeline’s opposition, Gervase set out to see the lost father, who had thus reversed all natural circumstances. Hillhead looked brighter than ever in the morning sunshine. The lake lay at the foot of the knoll, like a sheet of silver. Two or three tiny children were playing upon the lawn. As Gervase approached the door, the master of the house came out with a newspaper in his hand and a cigar. He sat down in a wicker chair upon the lawn. He cast a glance upon the lovely landscape and the playing children. The air of a man entirely at his ease, under his own vine and his own fig-tree, was in every movement. Gervase’s step, in his agitation, was very quick and light. Apparently it was not till he was quite near that it was heard by the comfortable paterfamilias with his newspaper. Then one of the children, a little girl of four or five, startled by the sight of the stranger, ran and stood by her father’s knee. “What is it?” Gervase heard him say. And then he looked up from behind the newspaper, and the father and son met. Mr Burton was evidently much startled. He rose hastily from his chair, dropping his paper. A curious tremor seemed to come over his solid well-set-up figure, that of a vigorous man of sixty or so. Men do not blush easily at that age; but there came a wave of hot colour over his face. He seemed to hesitate a moment, then--“Why, Gervase, how have you managed to find me out at the end of the world?” he said, with a nervous attempt at a laugh. Gervase saw, agitated as he himself was, the hurried glance at the children, which made his father look like a prodigal discovered.