"I can hardly tell, but I think I should know if you were. It is so dark here I can barely see you. Shall I open a shutter?" He made a movement to do so. "It is light enough for me," Adela answered; and he at once desisted from his purpose. "Won't you sit down?" she asked. He accepted the invitation. They conversed for a few moments about her studies and about what he himself had been doing since they last met. But at length he said: "You never would be able to guess, Adela, why I have come to see you to-day. You told me a very interesting story once--do you remember?--about your people. That was a legend; but now I have a true story to tell _you_, which is connected with yours. Would you like to hear it?" "I always like stories better than anything," said the girl. "Do tell it to me." Thereupon Lance narrated the tale with which we are familiar, adding the details of the picture, the first clew which he had caught in her resemblance to Jessie, and the extraordinary coincidence of the old rhyme from Wharton Hall. Adela listed intently, without interposing a syllable; but he could hear her breath coming and going, and occasionally she sighed. She was seated in a chair near his own; but, though his eyes were growing used to the gloom of the apartment, he felt her presence more by the warm irradiation of her vitality through the air than by actual vision. From time to time there was an audible flurry of light feet and flitting skirts in the passageway without, or in the rooms above, indicating the movement of young women from one point to another of the scanty scholastic edifice; and once a desk-bell rang punctiliously from a distance. But otherwise they were uninterrupted. As Lance proceeded with his story, the dimness of the light and the random brushing of the breeze against the shutters aided a species of hallucination that laid hold of him. While he retraced the mazes and the by-paths of the tradition that led back so far into the forests and the obscurity of an earlier epoch, the gloom of the wilderness itself seemed to surround him; the leaves of an unknown forest-land muttered and rustled in his ears; he felt like an explorer; he was making his way, he could fancy, toward the goal of his long striving and his harassed desire. Should he not meet, at the end of his wanderings, the object of his search? When he had finished the story he said: "_You_ have Indian blood in your veins, Adela." Her voice permeated the dusk slowly and hesitatingly: "Yes. But how do you know?" "I have seen your father, and he has told me." Lance rose and stepped toward the window. "Gertrude Wylde was your ancestress," he declared, "and she was the same woman as Ewayeá in your legend. It is I who have discovered this, and I have brought you, at last, out of all that mystery!"