"There was a question to be settled," said Saxham, "involving Bawne’s whole future. Here and Hereafter—and the question was this: Whether the son you have given me is worthy of his mother, or whether he has inherited any twist of brain, any degenerate and wretched weakness from the father whom your pure hand saved and led back, my guardian Saint, my heart’s beloved!—from the very threshold of the gates of Hell." "Owen! Don’t speak so of yourself. I will not hear it. You had been so wronged—driven beside yourself by misfortune and betrayal. You were not responsible——" She covered the little ears with the slender hands. He took the hands down and kissed them, and held them in his own, as he went on: "That is what I should like to believe. But—the truth is very different. There was—there is still, I suppose—a spot of weakness in me. A bubble of air in the casting—a flaw in the wrought steel." He looked like wrought steel as he spoke; "I had to be sure our boy is sound, mentally and morally as he is physically. Fit—in the fullest and highest sense of the word. Rather than have the doubt," said Saxham, "or the knowledge that confirms the doubt, I would——" "No, no!" She tried to free her slender hands, but the Doctor’s hold was as inexorable as gentle. "You must not say—that! I cannot bear——" "Ah, my poor love, you, too, have feared lest the sins of the father might some day be visited on the son!" said Saxham with a strange mingling of pity and sorrow and exultation. "Well, now for your comfort, believe they will not be. Bawne is all yours, Lynette. Young as he is, he has learned to master Self and conquer Fear. Obedience, Duty, and Honour are welded into the metal of his character. If I had not been my boy’s father, I should have envied that man—knowing what I have learned to-day. And therefore I do not grudge—I give freely——" "You give—you do not grudge——" She suddenly wrenched away her hands and said in a tone that chilled Saxham: "Owen, do you speak like this because you believe Bawne is—dead?" The Doctor made answer: "I believe that if God so decree our boy will yet be given back to us. As far as knowledge goes—except for one fact I am little wiser than you." "I must know what that one thing is! You will tell me now, and all!" The sun was rushing up over East London in a gloriole of golden fire. To her husband’s thought she was like some slender Roman patrician at the stake, as she stood up against the background of flaming splendour, and waited to hear the worst. *CHAPTER XLIII* *THE PLUNDERED NEST* If that story of the aëroplane over the North Sea in the thickening dark, fighting East against the side-thrust of the nor’-west gale, with the dropping revolutions and the hiccuping engine, had seemed desperate before, it was ghastly now. Saxham’s last hope died as he told. When he had done, Lynette said with strange, unnatural composure: