Suddenly her eyes flared up. Anger possessed her. She choked it down. Secretive--the poor bruised soul who had gone to her grave with a broken heart! “She secretive? No, Eglington,” she rejoined gravely, “she was congealed. She lived in too cold an air. She was not secretive, but yet she kept a secret--another’s.” Again Eglington had the feeling which possessed him when he entered the room. She had changed. There was something in her tone, a meaning, he had never heard before. He was startled. He recalled the words of the Duchess as she went up the staircase. What was it all about? “Whose secrets did she keep?” he asked, calmly enough. “Your father’s, yours, mine,” she replied, in a whisper almost. “Secret? What secret? Good Lord, such mystery!” He laughed mirthlessly. She came close to him. “I am sorry--sorry, Harry,” she said with difficulty. “It will hurt you, shock you so. It will be a blow to you, but you must bear it.” She tried to speak further, but her heart was beating so violently that she could not. She turned quickly to the portfolio on the desk, drew forth the fatal letter, and, turning to the page which contained the truth concerning David, handed it to him. “It is there,” she said. He had great self-control. Before looking at the page to which she had directed his attention, he turned the letter over slowly, fingering the pages one by one. “My mother to my father,” he remarked. Instinctively he knew what it contained. “You have been reading my mother’s correspondence,” he added in cold reproof. “Do you forget that you asked me to arrange her papers?” she retorted, stung by his suggestion. “Your imagination is vivid,” he exclaimed. Then he bethought himself that, after all, he might sorely need all she could give, if things went against him, and that she was the last person he could afford to alienate; “but I do remember that I asked you that,” he added--“no doubt foolishly.” “Read what is there,” she broke in, “and you will see that it was not foolish, that it was meant to be.” He felt a cold dead hand reaching out from the past to strike him; but he nerved himself, and his eyes searched the paper with assumed coolness-even with her he must still be acting. The first words he saw were: “Why did you not tell me that my boy, my baby Harry, was not your only child, and that your eldest son was alive?”