"Damaris," he said, at last, "speak to me."
"How can I speak to you when I don't understand," she answered gravely. "Either you lie—which I should be sorry to accuse you of doing—or you tell me a very terrible thing, if, that is, I at all comprehend what you say.—Are you not the son of Mrs. Faircloth, who lives at the inn out by the black cottages?"
"Yes, Lesbia Faircloth is my mother. And I ask for no better. She has squandered love upon me—squandered money, upon me too; but wisely and cleverly, with results. Still—" he paused—"well, it takes two, doesn't it, to make a man? One isn't one's mother's son only."
"But Mrs. Faircloth is a widow," Damaris reasoned, in wondering directness. "I have heard people speak of her husband. She was married."
"But not to my father. Do you ask for proofs—just think a minute. Whom did you mistake me for when I called you and came down over the Bar in the dusk?"
"No—no—" she protested trembling exceedingly. "That is not possible.
How could such a thing happen?"
"As such things mostly do happen. It is not the first case, nor will it by a long way, I reckon, be the last. They were young, and—mayn't we allow—they were beautiful. That's often a good deal to do with these accidents. They met and, God help them, they loved."
"No—no—" Damaris cried again.
Yet she kept her hands on Faircloth's shoulders, clinging to him in the excessive travail of her innocent spirit—though he racked her—for sympathy and for help.
"For whom, after all, did you take me?" he repeated. "If there wasn't considerable cause it would be incredible you should make such a mistake. Can you deny that I am hall-marked, that the fact of my parentage is written large in my flesh?"