"I'm a printer," he answered, "and one of your foremen gave me work to-day. I only began to-night—and I came upstairs to see you. I knew you were here."
Something in the way he uttered these last words clutched at Harvey's heart. "I knew you were here," the man repeated, nodding his head slowly, his eyes again on Harvey. And they seemed to melt with a strange wild longing, following him with a kind of defiant wistfulness. Somehow, like a faint and fleeting dream, Jessie's face—or an expression Harvey had often seen upon it—passed like a wraith between him and the bearded man.
"Who are you?" he said huskily.
The man's eyes rested a moment on the floor—and he was trembling where he stood. Slowly he raised them till they rested on Harvey's pallid face. Then they looked long and silently at each other, the dread and voiceless dialogue waging—that awesome interchange of soul with soul that makes men tremble, when eyes speak to answering eyes as lightning calls from peak to peak.
"I'm your father," the low voice said at last, the deep eyes leaping towards him in a strange mastery of strength and passion.
Harvey gave a cry and started back. The man followed him, straightening as he came, the hungering face out-held a little, pursuing still. The younger man retreated farther, gasping; and his eyes, like something suddenly released, raced about the unkempt form, surveying boots and clothes and beard and brow in an abandonment of candour.
"No, no," he murmured as he kept creeping back, the man following still; "no, no, it cannot be."
The stranger's hand was outstretched now. Something whitish was in it—and something black. "Look," he said, his lips parting in a weird, unearthly smile, "look, and deny it if you can; it's a photograph—and a letter."
Harvey stood still; then took them from the outstretched hand. The gas jet was just above. He read the letter first—it was his mother's handiwork. And the letter breathed of love, and hope, and of impatient joy at their approaching wedding-day.
Then he held the sharp-edged tin-type up before him. And then he knew. For his eye fell first on his mother's face, sweet with the new-born joy of motherhood. And a laughing babe was in her arms—and the man beside her, one hand resting on her shoulder, was the man whose panting breath he heard, whose burning eyes were fixed upon him now.