Sylvia smiled, an incredulous smile, and shook her head slowly, like a worn, tired mother whose patience is sorely taxed by a stubborn, unyielding child at her knee.  Her lips trembled, but she bent her head for a moment and then spoke more quickly than before, as though overriding some inner spirit that strove rebelliously within her breast.

“I know—­almost all I ever need to know.  But there are some things you must tell me now.  This is the first—­and the last—­time that I shall ever speak to you of these things.  I know enough—­things I have stumbled upon—­and I have built them up until I see the horror, the blackness.  And I want to feel sure that you, too, see the pity of it all.”

Her note of subdued passion roused him now to earnestness, and he framed a disavowal of the worst she might have imagined.  He could calm her fears at once, and the lines in his face relaxed at the thought that it was in his power to afford her this relief.

“I married your mother.  There was nothing wrong about it.  It was all straight.”

“And you thought, oh, you thought I came for that—­you believed I came to have you satisfy me of her honor!  I never doubted her!” and she lifted her head proudly.  “And that is what you thought I came for?” The indignation that flashed in her first stammered sentences died falteringly in a contemptuous whisper.

Her words had cut him deep; he turned away aimlessly, fingering some papers on the table beside him.  Then he plunged to the heart of the matter, as though in haste to exculpate himself.

“I never meant that it should happen as it did.  I knew her in New York when we were both students there.  My father had been ill a long time; he was bent upon my marrying the daughter of his old friend Singleton, a man of wealth and influence in our part of the state.  I persuaded your mother to run away and we were married, under an assumed name,—­but it was a marriage good in law.  There’s no question of that, you understand.  Then I left her up there in the Adirondacks, and went home.  My father’s illness was prolonged, and his condition justified me in asking your mother to wait.  She knew the circumstances and agreed to remain away until I saw my way clear to acknowledging her and taking her home.  You were born up there.  Your mother grew impatient and hurt because I could not go back to her.  But I could not—­it would have ruined all my chances at home.  When I went to find my wife she had disappeared.  She was a proud woman, and I suppose she had good cause for hating me.”

He told the story fully, filling in the gaps in her own knowledge.  He did not disguise the fact of his own half-hearted search for the woman he had deserted.  He even told of the precautions he had taken to assure himself of the death of Edna Kelton by visiting Montgomery to look at her grave before his marriage to Hallie Singleton.  He had gone back again shortly before he made the offer to pay for Sylvia’s schooling, and had seen her with her grandfather in the little garden among the roses.