"It is certainly true, Charlotte, that my father and your grandfather married again."
"Yes, uncle."
"It is also highly probable that this young woman is the daughter of that marriage. When I saw her in this room to-day I was puzzled by an intangible likeness in her. This accounts for it."
"Then why——" began Charlotte, and then she stopped. There was a whole world of bitterness in her tone.
"Sit down, child," said her uncle. He pointed to a footstool at his feet. Whenever he came into this room Charlotte had occupied this footstool, and he wanted her to take it now, but she would not; she still kept her place on the hearth.
"I cannot sit," she said. "I am excited—greatly excited. This looks to me in the light of a wrong."
"Who do you think has committed the wrong, Charlotte?"
Before she answered, Charlotte Harman lit a pair of candles which stood on the mantelshelf.
"There, now," she said with a sigh of relief, "I can see your face. It is dreadful to speak to any one in the dark. Uncle Jasper, if I had so near a relation living all these years why was I never told of it? I have over and over again longed for a sister, and it seems I had one or one who might have been to me a sister. Why was I kept in ignorance of her very existence?"
"You are like all women—unreasonable, Lottie. I am glad to find you so human, my dear; so human, and—and—womanly. You jump to conclusions without hearing reasons. Now I will give you the reasons. But I do wish you would sit down."