When Lionel was asleep Dora anxiously crept into her mother's room. A lamp was now burning on a table, but Dora blew it out, and went and sat on the edge of her mother's bed.
“I know your secret now,” Mrs. Barry faltered, with a suppressed sob in her pillow. “All these years I have wondered over your great trouble, and why you were not more open with me about it, but Lionel has made it clear. I understand now.”
“Did Kenneth Galt tell my child that—” Dora cried out, in a rasping undertone. “Did he dare to—”
“No, no, not that!” the old woman corrected. “He simply betrayed himself in his conduct toward the boy. Listen! Lionel need never suspect that you know what he did, but you must be told the truth. It is too beautiful for you to miss.”
She told the whole story as it had come from the child's lips, together with other things she had culled as to happenings between him and his father on former occasions.
“Let them both alone,” she added, fervently, as she concluded. “The little fellow, nameless and cast out as he is, has of himself won the love God gave him the right to. It is his. Let him keep it, and I pray Heaven that it may drag that haughty spirit down into the mire of repentance. I've thought it all over. I remember the date well. I know now why he deserted you; he couldn't face public exposure just at that particular time. His temptation was great, and he fell. I believe he loved you then, and that he does yet.”
“Does yet!” Dora sneered, and she put a protesting hand out to her mother's as it lay on the coverlet. “Don't say that. He couldn't now—after all this time.”
“But he does, he does—a thousand times more than he did, too,” the old woman insisted. “He hasn't married; he is leading a lonely, morbid life. He-is longing for you—though he may still dread public opinion—and is adoring the child. He may resist longer, but in the end he will succumb and crawl to your feet and beg for forgiveness. Watch my prophecy. He'll do it!—he'll do it!”
“You don't know, mother,” Dora sighed, and she stood up and moved away in the darkness. “You don't know.”
Dora went back to her room and stood looking down at her sleeping child. Suddenly her eyes filled and her breast heaved high.