"My—my mother," Tony said, with a different ring in his voice and a different look in his eyes.
"No, lad—no! 'Tain't that way," Taylor exclaimed warmly. "She's been your mother—and more maybe."
The dull wits for once acted quickly, and into Taylor's mind there came on the moment the memory of that night a score of years ago, when he saw his wife clutch the nameless babe and clasp it to her bosom, and the same fling of memory brought back also the building of the slim rail fence round the little mound in the corner of the paddock—the fence that was never without a trailing, flowering vine growing over it—and the dull, prosaic mind tried to understand something of the beauty and the glamour of it, but only grew more confused under the spell of unfamiliar emotion.
"You should have left it as it was, lad; you should have left it as it was," he mumbled. "Where's the good of stirring it up now? It's twenty years and more ago."
"It's now to me—now and always," Tony answered. "And I want to know it all—everything."
Taylor wondered. Should he tell the story in his own heavy fashion, or go and ask his wife to tell it? There was no sense in keeping it a secret any more now, but he remembered his wife's words of twenty years before, "No one shall take him from me; no one—never."
"We'll go and ask the missus," he said; and together they walked to the house, silent.
At the door Mrs. Taylor met them. Before she could speak Taylor interposed.
"He's heard something of the yarn, and wants to know the facts," he said; "so we came along to you."
Taking the remark to apply to what she herself had in her mind, Mrs. Taylor put her hand on Tony's arm and smiled.