"There is very little more to tell. I took charge of you as I had promised, and I placed you with Mrs. Jent, who is an old servant of mine. You were seriously ill, and were not expected to live. Seeing that your mother was in gaol and your father dead by her hand, I used to think sometimes that it would have been better for you to have died."
"I'm glad I did not," cried Neil with vehemence. "I have lived to vindicate my mother's innocence."
"You are not likely to where others have failed," Mr. Cass said, sadly. "However, although I thought it would better for yourself and for all concerned that you should not recover, I did not feel justified in letting you slip through my fingers. I got the best doctors to see you, and they managed to pull you round after months of suspense. But the memory of your childhood, up to the time of your illness, was gone from you for ever. It was just as well, seeing how terrible that childhood had been. I made no attempt to revive your dormant memory, and I warned Mrs. Jent not to say anything either. We supplied you with a fictitious past."
"I know," said Neil, with a faint smile. "The American parents! I believed in them until I went to New York. Then I made enquiries; but as I could find no trace of them, and could hear nothing about them, I began to doubt their existence. If it had not been for my relating that dream, you would not have informed me of the truth."
"No," Mr. Cass said, honestly. "I would not, seeing what pain it must have inflicted upon you. I should have simply requested you to forget Ruth, and go away; the rest I would have spared you."
"I thank you for your forbearance," Neil said, politely, but coldly. "But Providence knew that I had a duty to perform, and so gave me back the past. Oh, it was no miracle!" he went on, with a shrug. "I am not a believer in the supernatural, as you know. I can see how it all came about. Can't you?"
"No; I confess that I am amazed that the dream should have been so accurate, or, indeed, that it should have come to you at all."
"Dreams, I have heard, are only the impressions of our waking hours in more confused forms," said Webster, quietly. "And as I had received no injury to the brain itself, my memory was only dormant, not destroyed. It was awakened by the sight of the face in that photograph."
"Ah! so it was," Mr. Cass said. "And the sight recalled your instinctive hatred for the man. That was why you fainted."
"Exactly; and no doubt, all that night, my brain was busily running back through the years. Then I found the Turnpike House."