“When I’m gone I want you to put yourself near him--learn to know him, if that should be possible. I am trusting you. You would never, I know, do him an injury. Some day he may need you. Remember, he does not know--it may be he need never know. But oh, be kind to him....” He stared at the words. Had it been one of those unaccountable affairs--he had heard of such--where a gently reared woman falls prey to a coarse-fibered man in every way her inferior? The man might be common, low, ignorant and cruel. Bruce had been proud of his ancestry. The Storrs were of old American stock, and his mother’s family, the Bruces, had been the foremost people in their county for nearly a century. He had taken a pardonable pride in his background.... That night when he had stumbled out of the house after hearing his mother’s confession he had felt the old friendly world recede. The letters, sealed and entrusted to the family physician for delivery at her death, merely repeated what she had told him. In his constant rereadings he had hoped that one day he would find that he had misinterpreted the message. He might dismiss his mother’s story as the fabrication of a sick woman’s mind. But today he knew the folly of this; the disclosure took its place in his mind among the unalterable facts of his life. At first he had thought of destroying himself; but he was too sane and the hope of life was too strong for such a solution of his problem. And there had been offers--flattering ones--to go to New York and Boston. He convinced himself that his mother could not seriously have meant to limit the range of his opportunities by sending him to the city where his unknown father lived. But he was resolved not to shirk; he would do her bidding. There was a strain of superstition in him: he might invite misfortune by disregarding her plea; and moreover he had the pride and courage of youth. No one knew, no one need ever know! He had escaped from the feeling, at first poignant, that shame attached to him; that he must slink through life under the eyes of a scornful world. No; he had mastered that; his pride rallied; he felt equal to any demand fate might make upon him; he was resolved to set his goal high.... Life had been very pleasant in Laconia, the Ohio town where John Storrs had been a lawyer of average attainments--in no way brilliant, but highly respected for his probity and enjoying for years a fair practice. Bruce had cousins of his own age, cheery, wholesome contemporaries with whom he had chummed from childhood. The Storrs, like the Bruces, his mother’s people, were of a type familiar in Mid-western county seats, kindly, optimistic, well-to-do folk, not too contented or self-satisfied to be unaware of the stir and movement of the larger world.