As soon as I could steady my voice and feel certain of my self-possession, I communicated my family name to the cure, and asked him if that was not part of the secret that he had been requested to preserve.
He started back several steps, and clasped his hands amazedly.
“Can it be?” he said, in low tones, gazing at me earnestly, with something like dread in his face.
I gave him my passport, and looked away toward the grave. The tears came into my eyes as the recollections of past days crowded back on me. Hardly knowing what I did, I knelt down by the grave, and smoothed the grass over it with my hand. Oh, Uncle George, why not have told your secret to your old playmate? Why leave him to find you here?
The priest raised me gently, and begged me to go with him into his own house. On our way there, I mentioned persons and places that I thought my uncle might have spoken of, in order to satisfy my companion that I was really the person I represented myself to be. By the time we had entered his little parlor, and had sat down alone in it, we were almost like old friends together.
I thought it best that I should begin by telling all that I have related here on the subject of Uncle George, and his disappearance from home. My host listened with a very sad face, and said, when I had done:
“I can understand your anxiety to know what I am authorized to tell you, but pardon me if I say first that there are circumstances in your uncle’s story which it may pain you to hear—” He stopped suddenly.
“Which it may pain me to hear as a nephew?” I asked.
“No,” said the priest, looking away from me, “as a son.”
I gratefully expressed my sense of the delicacy and kindness which had prompted my companion’s warning, but I begged him, at the same time, to keep me no longer in suspense and to tell me the stern truth, no matter how painfully it might affect me as a listener.