"Sit down, Curtiss," said our junior imploringly. "It's hard enough, at best—I—can't tell you at all if you take it that way."
Curtiss glanced at him again, then sat down.
"Now tell me," he said quietly, but I saw how his hands were trembling.
"I don't wonder she fled," began Mr. Royce, shrinking from the plunge. "She couldn't face the world——"
"But me," cried Curtiss; "she could have faced me!"
"You least of all."
"Tell me," whispered Curtiss. "Let me judge of that."
There was no resisting him—it was his right to know—so our junior told the story, as briefly as might be.
He bore it better than I had hoped. After a time, he was able to talk of it quite calmly, to ask a question or two, to tell us something of his own boyhood, and of the people who reared him.
"I never suspected," he concluded, "that John Curtiss and his wife weren't really my grandparents. They told me my father and mother were dead, and they certainly treated me as a child of their own. They had no other children, and doubtless by the time I came of age to ask questions, regarded me as wholly theirs. Mrs. Curtiss died when I was sixteen, her husband three years later, just as I was ready to enter college; and I found that he'd made me his sole heir, and that I was worth some thirty thousand dollars. I went on to college, as they'd wished me to. And now," he added, "what shall I do? Shall I go to Elizabeth and see Mrs. Lawrence——"