“The best explanation I can find of your mother’s change toward me is one that belongs in the domain of psychology and pathology.  She suffered a great deal at your birth and she never regained her former strength.  When she rose from her bed it was with a shadow over her mind.  I saw that she was unhappy and nervous in my presence.  Indeed, I had at times to face the awful sensation of feeling that I was actually repugnant to her.  She was especially irritable if I kissed or fondled you.  She dropped all her friends; she never made calls; she refused to see callers.  I consulted specialists and all the satisfaction I had was that she was of a peculiarly high-strung nature and that in certain phases of melancholia, where there is no complete mental and physical breakdown, the patient turns on the one whom she would hold nearest and dearest if she were normal.  The child that had taken her strength became the virtual passion of her worship, which she would share with no one.

“When she proposed to go to Europe for a rest, taking you with her, I welcomed the idea.  I rejoiced in the hope that the doctors held out that she would come back well, and I ventured to believe in a happy future, with you as our common object of love and care.  But she never returned, as you know; and she only wrote me once, a wild sort of letter about what a beautiful boy you were and that she had you and I had the store and I was never to send her any more remittances.

“I made a number of trips to Europe.  I could not go frequently, because in those days, Jack, I was a heavy borrower of money in the expansion of my business, and only one who has built up a great business can understand how, in the earlier and more uncertain period of our banking credits, the absence of personal attention in any sudden crisis might throw you on the rocks.  Naturally, when I went I wrote to Alice that I was coming; but I always found that she had gone and left no address for forwarding mail from the Credit Lyonnais.  Once when I went without writing she eluded me, and the second time I found that she had a cottage at Versailles.  That, as you know, was the only occasion when I ever saw you or her until I came to bring you home after her sudden death.”

“Yes,” Jack whispered starkly.  “That day I had left her as well as usual and came home to find her lying still and white on a couch, her book fallen out of her hand onto the floor and—­” the words choked in his throat.

“And the stranger, your father, who came for you seemed very hard and forbidding to you!”

“Yes,” Jack managed to say.