He stepped into the room. The room was empty. It was Mona's sitting-room, her work-room, her parlor, her nursery. Out of it there opened another room by a door at the further end of the hall on the left. The door of that other room was ajar, and Ewan could hear, from where he now stood quivering in every limb, the soft cooing of the child--his child, his dead wife's child--and the inarticulate nothings that Mona, the foster-mother, babbled over it. "Boo-loo-la-la-pa-pa," "Dearee-dearee-dear," and then the tender cooing died off into a murmur, and an almost noiseless, long kiss on the full round baby-neck. Ewan stood irresolute for a moment, and the sweat started from his forehead. He felt like one who has been kneeling at a shrine when a foul hand besmudges it. He had half swung about to go back, when his ear caught the sound of the Deemster's restless foot outside. He could not go back: the poison had gone to his heart. He stepped into the bedroom that led out of the sitting-room. Mona raised her eyes as her brother entered. She was leaning over the cot, her beautiful face alive with the light of a tender love--a very vision of pure and delicious womanhood. Almost she had lifted the child from the cot to Ewan's arms when at a second glance she recognized the solemn expression of his face, and then she let the little one slide back to its pillow. "What has happened?" "Is it true," he began very slowly, "that Dan has been here?" Then Mona blushed deeply, and there was a pause. "Is it true?" he said again, and now with a hurried and startled look; "is it true that Dan has been here--here?" Mona misunderstood his emphasis. Ewan was standing in her chamber, and when he asked if Dan had been there, he was inquiring if Dan had been with her in that very room. She did not comprehend the evil thought that had been put in his heart. But she remembered the prohibition placed upon her both by Ewan and her father, never to receive Dan again, and her confusion at the moment of Ewan's question came of the knowledge that, contrary to that prohibition, she had received him. "Is it true?" he asked yet again, and he trembled with the passion he suppressed. After a pause he answered himself, with an awful composure, "It _is_ true." The child lifted itself and babbled at Mona with its innocent face all smiles, and Mona turned to hide her confusion by leaning over the cot. "Boo--loo--la-la." Then a great wave of passion seemed to come to Ewan, and he stepped to his sister, and took her by both hands. He was like a strong man in a dream, who feels sure that he can only be dreaming--struggling in vain to awake from a terrible nightmare, and knowing that a nightmare it must be that sits on him and crushes him. "No, no, there must be a mistake; there must, there must," he said, and his hot breathing beat on her face. "He has never been here --here--never."