“Yes, Dick.”
“Don't you think we'd better have a talk?”
“What about?” she asked, with her heart hammering.
“About me.” He stood above her, and looked down, still with the tenderness with which he always regarded her, but with resolution in his very attitude. “First of all, I'll tell you something. Then I'll ask you to tell me all you can.”
She yearned over him as he told her, for all her terror. His voice, for all its steadiness, was strained.
“I have felt for some time,” he finished, “that you and David were keeping something from me. I think, now, that this is what it was. Of course, you realize that I shall have to know.”
“Dick! Dick!” was all she could say.
“I was about,” he went on, with his almost terrible steadiness, “to ask a girl to take my name. I want to know if I have a name to offer her. I have, you see, only two alternatives to believe about myself. Either I am Henry Livingstone's illegitimate son, and in that case I have no right to my name, or to offer it to any one, or I am—”
He made a despairing gesture.
“—or I am some one else, some one who was smuggled out of the mountains and given an identity that makes him a living lie.”