"Hadn't I better go, Mr. Whitelaw? I haven't been up to my room yet."
"No, Hildred. I'd rather that you stayed, if you don't mind. It's the reason we've asked you to come."
He looked at no one. His face was a little white, though he was master of himself.
"This is the tenth of May. It's twenty-three years ago to-day since we lost our little boy. I want to ask the family, now that we're all together, what they think of the chances of our having found him again."
Though he knew it was an anniversary in the family, it was Tom's first recollection of the date. In as far as it was his birthday, birthdays had been meaningless to him, except as he remembered that they had come and gone, and made him a year older.
"Personally," Whitelaw went on, "I've fought this off so long that I can't do it any longer. It will be five years this summer since I first saw him, at Dublin, New Hampshire, and was struck with his looks and his name, as well as with the little I learned of his history."
"Why didn't you do something about it then," Tad put in, peevishly, "if you were going to do anything at all?"
"You're quite right, Tad. It's what I should have done. I was dissuaded by the rest of you. I must confess, too, that I was afraid to take it up myself. We'd followed so many clues that led to nothing! But perhaps it's just as well, as it's given me time to make all the investigation that, it seems to me, has been possible."
Apart from the motion of Tad's and Lily's hands as they put their cigarettes to their lips, everyone sat motionless and tense. Even Mrs. Whitelaw tamed her feverish activity to a more feverish stillness. Hildred put her hand lightly on Tom's sleeve to remind him that she was there, but the power of feeling anything had gone out of him. While Whitelaw told his facts he listened as if the case had nothing to do with himself.