"Surely that's not Frank?" murmured Lord Kilconquar. It certainly was not Frank; and yet it was some one who looked strangely familiar to one or two of the older people present. He made straight for Andrew, his hand outstretched. "Don't you know me?" he asked; and the voice recalled strange memories too. Andrew was not altogether unprepared for some such apparition appearing some day, though scarcely on such a horribly ill-timed occasion. Somehow, he had always imagined the dread possibility as happening in his office. But he remembered exactly how he had decided to confront it. He pulled his lip hard down, his eyes contracted dangerously, and then he merely shook his head. "What!" cried the young man, with a touching note of rebuffed affection. "Don't you recognize your own son?" Andrew's brain reeled. His mouth fell open, and his stare lost all traces of formidableness. "Father!" said the stranger in a moving voice. Incoherently Andrew burst out. "You--you--you're not my son!" His disclaimer seemed so evidently sincere that the sense of the company was already in sympathy with the victim of this outrageous intrusion, when--alas for him!--his aunt chose that fatal moment, of all others, to rush out of her chronic background. "Andrew!" she cried, her cheeks suddenly very pink, her eyes strangely excited, her voice trembling with the fervor of her appeal. "He must be--oh, he must be! Look--look at the likeness to your father! Oh, Andrew, what if it is irregular; surely you wouldn't deny the living image of poor Heriot!" "By Gad! So he is," exclaimed Lord Kilconquar. A general murmur instinctively confirmed this verdict. They wished to be charitable--but what a family resemblance! "I--I--I tell you it's a put-up job!" stammered their host. "Who put it up, father?" asked the strange youth plaintively. Lord Kilconquar shook his head, and again the startled company followed his lead. "Look, Andrew!" cried his aunt, pointing to a tinted photograph of James Heriot Walkingshaw at the age of twenty, which hung above the mantelpiece. "Oh, just look at the resemblance!" The young man regarded this work of art with evident emotion. "My sainted grandfather!" he murmured, though quite loud enough for the company to hear. The poor lady stretched her thin clasped hands beseechingly under Andrew's very nose. "He says it himself--he says it himself!" she pleaded. "For Heriot's sake, don't disown him!" There was a rustle of silk, decisive and ominous. It was caused by the skirt of the chaste lady of Pettigrew. "Good-night," she said. She only touched her brother's hand with the tips of her fingers, and her stony glance gave him his first clear vision of the appalling chasm that yawned beneath his feet. "Maggie!" he besought her, "you don't believe it?" "Can you not disgrace yourself _quietly_?" she hissed, and a moment later was gone.