‘Bad?’ the girl said, nodding her comprehension; and her colour slowly faded.

‘Bad,’ he said gravely, looking down at the table.

Julia took her fostermother’s hand in hers, and patted it; they were sitting side by side.  The elder woman, whose face was still furrowed by the tears she had shed in her bereavement, began to tremble.  ‘Tell us,’ the girl said bravely.  ‘What is it?’

‘God help me,’ Mr. Fishwick answered, his face quivering.  ’I don’t know how I shall tell you.  I don’t indeed.  But I must.’  Then, in a voice harsh with pain, ‘Child, I have made a mistake,’ he cried.  ’I am wrong, I was wrong, I have been wrong from the beginning.  God help me!  And God help us all!’

The elder woman broke into frightened weeping.  The younger grew pale and paler:  grew presently white to the lips.  Still her eyes met his, and did not flinch.  ‘Is it—­about our case?’ she whispered.

‘Yes!  Oh, my dear, will you ever forgive me?’

‘About my birth?’

He nodded.

‘I am not Julia Soane?  Is that it?’

He nodded again.

‘Not a Soane—­at all?’

‘No; God forgive me, no!’

She continued to hold the weeping woman’s hand in hers, and to look at him; but for a long minute she seemed not even to breathe.  Then in a voice that, notwithstanding the effort she made, sounded harsh in his ears, ‘Tell me all,’ she muttered.  ’I suppose—­you have found something!’

‘I have,’ he said.  He looked old, and worn, and shabby; and was at once the surest and the saddest corroboration of his own tidings.  ’Two days ago I found, by accident, in a church at Bristol, the death certificate of the—­of the child.’

‘Julia Soane?’

‘Yes.’

‘But then—­who am I?’ she asked, her eyes growing wild:  the world was turning, turning with her.

‘Her husband,’ he answered, nodding towards Mrs. Masterson, ’adopted a child in place of the dead one, and said nothing.  Whether he intended to pass it off for the child entrusted to him, I don’t know.  He never made any attempt to do so.  Perhaps,’ the lawyer continued drearily, ’he had it in his mind, and when the time came his heart failed him.’

‘And I am that child?’

Mr. Fishwick looked away guiltily, passing his tongue over his lips.  He was the picture of shame and remorse.

‘Yes,’ he said.  ’Your father and mother were French.  He was a teacher of French at Bristol, his wife French from Canterbury.  No relations are known.’

‘My name?’ she asked, smiling piteously.

‘Pare,’ he said, spelling it.  And he added, ‘They call it Parry.’

She looked round the room in a kind of terror, not unmixed with wonder.  To that room they had retired to review their plans on their first arrival at the Castle Inn—­when all smiled on them.  Thither they had fled for refuge after the brush with Lady Dunborough and the rencontre with Sir George.  To that room she had betaken herself in the first flush and triumph of Sir George’s suit; and there, surrounded by the same objects on which she now gazed, she had sat, rapt in rosy visions, through the livelong day preceding her abduction.  Then she had been a gentlewoman, an heiress, the bride in prospect of a gallant gentleman.  Now?