“I thought,” she at length said, “that you were pretending not to know, and I wanted, in that case, to discover what other—what else you might be holding back from me.”
“Holding back from you? What else?” he echoed. “What else was there?”
“I wasn’t sure, you see. Nothing that I knew,” she affirmed frankly, laughing away the sudden rigor of sadness on his face. “There was another reason, though. There was something which I had been saving for the very last moment to show you. But I was rather ashamed of wanting to so much, and, after the way you had taken the rest of the house, I hesitated. Just as I finally was going to, lunch was ready—remember?”
Hastings awkwardly withdrew his right hand, which had been resting palm downward on his knee, and thrust it into his pocket.
“Julia,” he cried out, in characteristic disregard of all context, “suppose Mr. Eberdeen should turn out to have been—well—a relative, or something? It might account, you know, for my asking that question, and—and for how everything here”—he looked inclusively round him—“for how this all impressed me so.”
She waited, hopeful of the time having at last come when he might wish to confide in her whatever it was—if, indeed, he knew—that had happened; but he only ingenuously continued to hold out to her the possibility of his new idea.
“No,” she told him, with a disappointment which she couldn’t conceal, “he wasn’t. I’ve looked up his entire history. He died right here, and he had no children. Your pedigree I know by heart.”
Hastings smiled at her thoroughness.
“What,” he exclaimed, “if some unrecorded forebear of mine has eluded you? Somebody,” he dreamily improvised, “who knew this house, who was familiar with every turn of the road, every habit of the mist. It’s just such a smug little, old, weather-worn town like Rockface, where any New Englander is likely to find traces of forgotten ancestors.”
The sound of footsteps made them both look toward the gate.