"When she was a woman--she was still a child to me; over twenty, but I was not twice her age--she went North, and there she fell in love. She wrote me that she was to marry a Northerner, and when she added his name--it was the son of the man who killed her father." "It is not possible!" the other exclaimed. "You imagined it. Such things happen in melodramas--" She put up her hand and arrested his words. "This happened not in a melodrama, but in a tragedy--in my life," she said. "I need not go into details. She married him, and I have never seen her since." "Did he know?" "No. It was my wedding gift to my daughter--that I kept her secret. That was all I had strength to do. You think I was an unnatural mother, of course; but--" She saw that his eyes were moist as he raised them in answering. "I should have said so yesterday without any hesitation; to-day--" "To-day?" she echoed eagerly, as he paused. "To-day," he answered, letting his glance sweep over the pathetic memorials so thick about them--"to-day at least I understand, and I do not wonder." She looked at him with all her heart in her eyes, trying to read his most hidden feeling. Then she touched his arm lightly with the tips of her slender black-gloved fingers. "Come," she said. She led him across the room, and pointed to a colonel's sash and pistols which lay in one of the cases under a faded card. "Those were my husband's." "Those!" he cried. "You Louise's mother? It is impossible!" "It may be impossible; but, as I said of the other thing, it is true." "The other thing?" he repeated. "What--do you mean the thing you said--that my father and he-- That cannot be true. I should surely have known!" "It is true," she insisted. "At the moment it happened they were surrounded by our soldiers, and his own men probably did not realize just what happened. But I--I know every minute of that fight! One of my husband's staff had been at West Point with them both, and he told me. He saw it, and tried to come between them. Your wife married you, knowing you to be the son of the man who killed her father." The Northerner passed his hand across his forehead as if to wipe away the confusion of his mind. His eyes were cast down, but she saw that their lids were wet. "Poor Louise!" he murmured, seemingly rather to himself than to her; "how she must have suffered over that secret. Poor Louise!" "You come here," Mrs. Desborough went on, feeling herself choke at his words, but determined not to give way to the warmer impulse of her heart, "and even you are moved by these sacred relics. What do you think they are to us?"