“Your wife! Annie Dale your wife!” Everet repeated, starting back, amazed, all his color fading again at those words, and shocked into more respectful speech by the unexpected acknowledgment.
CHAPTER XLVIII.
PEACE AT LAST.
“Yes, Annie Dale was my wife!”
Everet bent a sullen look upon Geoffrey.
“Then he is not a——”
An imperative gesture from his father silenced the obnoxious word that trembled on his lips.
“Geoffrey Huntress, as he has hitherto been known,” he said, “is my son, honorably entitled to my name, and an equal share with yourself of all I possess—a son whom I long mourned as dead, but whom I have most gladly welcomed to my heart and home this night, upon learning who he was.”
“Would you have done so had you not been forced to it?” Everet rudely demanded.
“Everet, you are very disrespectful to-night,” returned his father, with a frown, “I cannot understand why you should manifest such a spirit of hostility. But we will not talk more of this now; you shall have the details of the story of my early life later. I trust, however, that your sense of what is right and just will prompt you to some acknowledgment for your discourtesy toward your brother.”
“My brother!” retorted Everet, aroused afresh at the word; “he has been nothing but a stumbling-block in my path ever since I first saw him; he humiliated me before friends in a way that I have never forgiven; he thwarted me in my hopes at college and in many plans—all but the last one,” he concluded, with a taunting laugh, turning defiantly toward Geoffrey, who was regarding him with more of sorrow than of anger.