He stopped and laid down the fiddle, well pleased with himself. For that part of his audience to which he had played was in tears. Molly jumped up. "Alice dear, what is the matter?" "Oh, Molly, it is beautiful! Oh, it is beautiful! For I've done it. I know it all. I've been on tramp myself--just as he played it--with the fiddle, too--just as he made it. Oh, I know the country fair, and the village inn, and the circus, and all! I remember it all. When last I went on tramp I had my----!" "Alice," her husband interposed. "Don't, my dear." "It is four and twenty years ago. I remember it all so well. I had my----" "Alice"--her husband stopped her again. She sighed. "Yes--yes. I try not to think of it. He deserted me after that last tramp. He couldn't bear the crying of the dear child. He deserted me, and when I found him again, in America, he put me away--by the law, as if he was ashamed of me." "Desertion and divorce," said Dick, "were my mother's lot as well. She, too, was deserted and divorced. Is it a common lot?" "His name," said Alice, "was the same as yours. It was Woodroffe--and you are strangely like him." "My father's name was John Anthony Woodroffe." Alice sprang to her feet and clasped her hands. "Oh, my dream--my dream! Is it coming true? You are--you are---- Oh, how old are you?" She caught him by the arm, and gazed into his face as if seeking her own likeness there as well as her husband's. "I am twenty-two." "No; it is impossible." She sank back. "For a moment I thought you might be--my own boy. Yet you are his. Oh, it is strange! Who was your mother, then?" "She was a rider in a circus." "And he married her and deserted her?" "Yes--and divorced her; and I know nothing more about him." "He must have married your mother directly after he divorced me." "No doubt he has treated a dozen women in the same manner since then," said Dick, with unfilial bitterness. "The fifth commandment always presented insuperable difficulties to me." "Your mother was a player, too?" said Alice. "He always grumbled because I could not play." "My mother was the Equestrienne of the Haute École that I talked about just now. She was represented on the bills as the Pride of the States, the Envy of Europe, who had refused princes in the lands of tyrants, rather than forsake nature's nobility and the aristocracy of the republic." "I remember, Dick," said Molly. "You used to tell my father all about it." "I was born and brought up in the sawdust. And I played all the instruments in the orchestra one after the other. And I was afraid to go to church on account of that terrible announcement about the generations to follow the wicked man." "He will suffer; he must suffer," said Alice. "But I have long since put him out of my mind." "My mother never put him out of her mind. She died hoping that he would be made to suffer. For my own part, I hope that I may never meet him."