"Not!"
"No. That has come out now."
"Oh, I am glad. Are you sure? I'm so thankful. I never could bear to think of you as the son of that man. It would have been too frightful."
"You did not admire the portrait."
"Oh, I couldn't endure it. I may say so now. Such a horrid face!—weak and common and low! It was that which startled me so dreadfully on the top of the Petit Chamossaire—remembering the picture and—That, and—you know, I told you how I came to see it. Mrs. Brutt was ferreting round, and she fished that up."
(Mrs. Brutt set this and the resulting laugh down to the debit side of Doris's account. She put her lips together, and formed one word—"Vixen!")
"I can't tell how far the present position of things is an improvement. I'm in utter ignorance still who my father really was. My mother seems to have admitted that he was above her in birth,— and that that was the reason for secrecy. He did not want his people to know."
"What a coward he must have been! But, anyhow, we can be thankful that it is not that dreadful Phil Morris. You have always been sure that your father was a gentleman; and perhaps this will prove it. Don't you see?"
"I see that I've won a rare treasure."
(Mrs. Brutt heard something suspiciously like a kiss.)