He was face to face with the secret of his own life, and, in an instant, he understood the impression of familiarity produced upon him by the picture, for the ‘_R. F._’ told him all that he had not known. There was no drop in his veins of the blood of the race whose name he bore, for he was no Speid. Now all was plain. He was Robert Fullarton’s illegitimate son. He sat in the sleeping house looking at the little box which had wrecked his hopes more effectually than anything he had experienced that day. Now he understood Lady Eliza; now he realized how justifiable was her opposition. How could he, knowing what he knew, and what no doubt every soul around him knew, stand up before his neighbours and take Cecilia by the hand? how ask her to share the name which everyone could say was not his own? how endure that she should face with him a state of affairs which, for the first time, he clearly understood? He had been morally certain, before, that the bar sinister shadowed him, but, though he could have asked her to live under it with him when its existence was only known to herself and to him, the question being a social, not an ethical one, it would be an impossibility when the whole world was aware of it; when the father who could not acknowledge him was his neighbour. Never should she spend her life in a place where she might be pointed at as the wife of the nameless man. Ah, how well he understood Lady Eliza! But, thoroughly as he believed himself able to appreciate her motives, he had no idea of the extraordinary mixture of personal feeling in which they were founded, and he credited her with the sole desire to save Cecilia from an intolerable position. Though he never doubted that those among whom he lived were as enlightened as he himself now was, the substance of the posthumous revival of rumours, attributed by many to gossip arising from Mr. Speid’s actions after his wife’s death, was, in reality, the only clue possessed by anyone. By an act the generosity of which he admired with all his soul, his so-called father had legitimized him as far as lay in his power. No person could bring any proof against him of being other than he appeared, and in the eyes of the law he was as much Speid of Whanland as the man he had succeeded. He admired him all the more when he remembered that it was not an overwhelming affection for himself which had led him to take the step, but pure, abstract justice to a human being, who, through no fault of his own, had come into the world at a disadvantage. Nevertheless, whatever his legal position, he was an interloper, a pretender. He had identified himself with Whanland and loved every stick and stone in it, but he had been masquerading, for all that. What a trick she had played him, that beautiful creature upon the wall!