"Has 'Lisha Potts been in to-day?" Latimer inquired.
"No, but he'll be down to-morrow; Satiry insists that she's coming to bake us up once a week or so. Poppy don't want it, but I must look to it she don't overdo her strength; you see she isn't in body one of our hard-working race, Mr. Latimer. I sort of think her mother was a rather delicate woman."
With this for the entering wedge, Mr. Latimer saw his way to going farther.
"Then you have some idea about her mother? I have thought this for some time. I have an idea also, more than an idea; suppose we compare them," and he told briefly of the trunk of papers and 'Lisha finding them.
Instantly Gilbert's bent shoulders straightened, new life came to his eyes; leaning forward he sat in an attitude of such expectant certainty of what he was to hear that Latimer could not help smiling as he said, "Poppea's mother was—"
"Helen Angus, little Roseleaf, wife of that man who drove her to do what she did!" broke in Gilbert, unable to hold his conviction any longer. "No one who knew her could blame her,—I, who know what Angus is and was, least of all. Young Esterbrook was a dashing, taking blade, like many an army man, not steady like his uncle. I kept track of him for years one way or another; he never married, and was killed in Indian warfare near Cheyenne, so he would never have turned up; and yet, of course before the world this will be a blight upon Poppea. I wish 'Lisha Potts had dropped the papers in the bog; I wish to God he had, Mr. Latimer! Could you find it right in your conscience to burn the papers and let the past be buried? Need she know?"
"She knows already, Gilbert."
The old man groaned and struck his clenched hand on the table. "Ah, well," he said, "that takes it from my hands and the temptation with it, but it's hard, right hard, to feel, link by link, that my power to protect her from trouble is going. But," as an idea made him brighten again, "she can keep my name, can't she, dominie? It's hers, isn't it, by law?"
"Yes, Gilbert, it is hers for good unless she chooses to renounce it," Latimer replied fervently. "But stop a minute, old friend, think—suppose that young Esterbrook was not Poppea's father, and that the only wrong (though it was a virtue, not a fault) that Helen Angus did was in preferring to have her child born away from the atmosphere of tyranny that was crushing out her own life. Could you be glad? Not for yourself, not for ourselves, but for the law's full measure?"
For a while Gilbert sat so absolutely motionless that Latimer began to fear that he was suffering some sort of shock, while it was merely the slowness of his comprehension of what had never before occurred to him ever so remotely. A moment later, he started up with blazing eyes and all the fury of a madman.