Win opened his umbrella and went on. He walked home slowly and by a circuitous route. His mind traversed the subject back and forth, and at each moment he became more convinced, as all the muddle of puzzling circumstances fell into place in logical sequence. She was his half-sister, older than he was--his father’s first-born. By this accident of birth she was an outcast, penniless and unacknowledged, from the home and fortune he and Maud had inherited. At the very moment when the father had found her free to accept his bounty he had been snatched away. And she knew it. That was the explanation of her changeable conduct. She had found it out in some way between the deaths of her mother and Shackleton. Some one had told her or she had discovered it herself. In the dripping dark Win pondered it all, going up and down the ascending streets in a tortuous route homeward, wondering at fate, communing with himself. CHAPTER XVI REBELLIOUS HEARTS “Constant you are, But yet a woman; and for secrecy, No lady closer, for I will believe Thou wilt not utter what thou dost not know.” --SHAKESPEARE. Win found his mother in her boudoir and delivered Mrs. Willers’ letter to her without comment. He saw her read it and then sit silent, her brows drawn, looking into the fire beside which she sat. It was impossible just then for him to allude to the subject of the letter, and, after standing by the mantelpiece awkwardly warming his wet feet, he went upstairs to his own rooms. At dinner the family trio was unusually quiet. Under the blaze of light that fell from the great crystal chandelier over the table with its weight of glass and silver, the three participants looked preoccupied and stupid. The two Chinese servants, soft-footed as cats, and spotless in their crisp white, moved about the table noiselessly, offering dish after dish to their impassive employers. It was one of those irritating occasions when everything seems to combine for the purpose of exasperating. Bessie, annoyed by the contents of Mrs. Willers’ letter, found her annoyance augmented by the fact that Maud looked particularly plain that evening, and the Count de Lamolle was expected after dinner. Worry had robbed her face of such sparkle as it possessed and had accentuated its ungirlish heaviness. She felt that her engagement to Latimer must be announced, for the Count de Lamolle was exhibiting those signs of a coming proposal that she knew well, and what excuse could she give her mother for rejecting him? She must tell the truth, and the thought alarmed her shrinking and peaceable soul. She sat silent, crumbling her bread with a nervous hand and wondering how she could possibly avert the offer if the count showed symptoms of making it that evening.