"I dare not tell you," he gasped; "it is not—I fear—the disreputable thing you may be fancying."
"Not dare! By what right do you call this gentleman 'papa'?" she passionately demanded of the child.
"Mamma told me to. She would never let me come home to him before because of not wishing to part from me."
Mrs. Hamlyn gazed at him. "Where were you born?"
"At Calcutta; that's in India. Mamma brought me home in the Clipper of the Seas, and the ship went down, but quite everybody was not lost in it, though papa thought so."
The boy had evidently been well instructed. Eliza Hamlyn, grasping the whole truth now, staggered back in terror.
"Philip! Philip! is it true? Was it this you feared?"
He made a motion of assent and covered his face. "Heaven knows I would rather have died."
He stood back against the window-curtains, that they might shade his pain. She fell into a chair and wished he had died, years before.
But what was to be the end of it all? Though Eliza Hamlyn went straight out and despatched that syren of the golden hair with a poison-tipped bodkin (and possibly her will might be good to do it), it could not make things any the better for herself.