John left the hospital, he scarcely knew when, and could not tell how. He had forgotten, though he never could for a moment forget, that he had left waiting for him the two men, the man who---- Remember him!--it seemed to John an impossibility that ever again, even if he lived a hundred years, he could forget what had been revealed to him that day, or the look of the man’s face, who suddenly in a moment had lifted the veil of his own childish life, and made the playful, sweet recollection which had never died out of his mind an instrument of torture. He was conscious when he came out from under the shadow of the great building in which his mother’s life was spent, and found himself on the bridge with the clear vacancy of the river on each side of him, that the afternoon had waned, that the sun was going down, and that a sentiment of the coming evening, with its rest and quietness, was already in the air. But that a long time had elapsed since in hot haste and excitement he had crossed that bridge, going to demand from his mother an explanation of this horror, he could not tell. It was a moment, an age, he could not tell which. Despair had been in his soul, mingled with a passionate determination that this thing should not be, when he went: but he was still and silent as he returned. He had not received either explanation or proof. His mother’s panic was proof enough on one side, as were the few words that he had said on the other. These words alone were unanswerable, unforgettable. If the convict had vanished from his eyes unnamed, John felt that his fond recollection of that child in his night-gown was enough to have proved all the terrible story. For who could know it but himself and one other, himself and his father? His father! What a name that was, full of tenderness, full of honour, a name that could neither be obliterated nor transferred, nor lost in forgetfulness. A man’s father is his father for ever, whatever circumstances may arise. John, the son of----: is not that the primitive description, the first distinction of every man, the thing which gives him standing among his fellows? The mother may or may not have a name of her own, a reputation of her own--what does it signify? John, the son of Emily Sandford!--oh no, that was not his natural description. He was John, the son of Robert May. And Robert May was the convict whom he had picked up in the street, of whom he had been so kindly indulgent, so contemptuously tolerant.