That dim, dreadful, confused legend of his mother’s history, as regards which what Pinnie had been able to tell him when he first began to question her was at once too much and too little—this stupefying explanation had supplied him first and last with a hundred different theories of his identity. What he knew, what he guessed had sickened and what he didn’t know tormented him; but in his illuminated ignorance he had fashioned forth an article of faith. This had gradually emerged from the depths of darkness in which he found himself plunged as a consequence of the challenge he had addressed to Pinnie—while he was still only a child—on the memorable day that had transformed the whole face of his future. It was one January afternoon when he had come in from a walk. She was seated at her lamp, as usual, with her work, and had begun to tell him of a letter one of the lodgers had got describing the manner in which his brother-in-law’s shop at Nottingham had been rifled by burglars. He had listened to her story, standing in front of her, and then by way of response had suddenly said to her: “Who was that awful woman you took me to see ever so long ago?” The expression of her white face as she looked up at him, her fear of such an attack all dormant after so many years—this strange, scared, sick glance was a thing he could never forget, any more than the tone, with her breath failing her, in which she had repeated “That awful woman?” “That woman in the prison years ago—how old was I?—who was dying and who kissed me so, as I’ve never been kissed, as I never shall be again! Who _was_ she, who WAS she?” Poor Pinnie, to do her justice, had made, after she recovered her breath, a gallant fight: it had lasted a week; it was to leave her spent and sore for ever after, and before it was over Anastasius Vetch had been called in. At his instance she had retracted the falsehoods with which she had previously tried to put the boy off, and had made at last a confession and a report which he was satisfied to believe as complete as her knowledge. Hyacinth could never have told you why the crisis had occurred on such a day, why his question had broken out at that particular moment. The strangeness of the matter to himself was that the germ of his curiosity should have developed so slowly; that the haunting wonder which now, as he looked back, appeared to fill his whole childhood, should only after so long an interval have crept up to the air. It was only of course little by little that he had recovered his bearings in his new and more poignant consciousness; little by little that he had reconstructed his antecedents, taken the measure, so far as was possible, of his heredity. His having the courage to disinter from the _Times_ in the reading-room of the British Museum a report of his mother’s trial for the murder of Lord Frederick Purvis, which was very copious, the affair having been quite a _cause célèbre_; his resolution in sitting