Clemency gazed at him with a puzzled, almost suspicious, look.  “I knew I had an aunt and cousin in England named Ewing,” she said, “but I always supposed that my English aunt was not my real aunt, only my aunt by marriage, that she had married my father’s brother.”

“Your English aunt is your uncle’s own sister,” said James.

“I see:  my own mother and my aunt were sisters, and they married brothers,” Clemency said slowly.

“That is unusual, but not unprecedented,” said James.  He had never been involved in such a web of fabrication.  He felt his cheeks burning.  He was sure that he looked guilty, but Clemency did not seem to notice it.  She was reflecting, still with that puzzled knitting of her forehead and that introspective look in her blue eyes.  “I wonder if I look in the least like my own mother?” she said in a curious voice, as of one who feels her way.

“Once your uncle said to me that you were your own mother’s very image,” replied James eagerly.  He was glad to have the chance to say anything truthful.

Clemency’s face lightened.  She spoke with that fatuous innocence and romance of young girls, and often of older women, to whom romance and sentiment are in the place of reason.  “Then I know who that man was,” she announced in a delighted voice.  “You and Uncle Tom thought I would never know, but I do know.  I have found out my own self.”

“Who was he, dear?”

“Oh, I don’t know who he was really, and I don’t know who that woman was.  She does mix up things a good deal, but this much I do know—­why Uncle Tom passed off my aunt for my mother, and why we were always hiding from that man.  He was in love with my mother, and he was in love with me, because I am so much like her.  Now, tell me honest, dear, didn’t Uncle Tom ever tell you that that man was in love with my mother before I was born?”

“Yes, dear,” James answered, fairly bewildered over the fashion in which truth was lending itself to the need of falsehood.

Clemency nodded her head triumphantly.  “There, I told you I knew,” said she.  “Poor man, it was dreadful of him to pursue me so, and make us all so unhappy, and of course I never could have married him, even if it had not been for you.  I do think he looked like a wicked man, and of course I never could have endured the thought of marrying a man who had been in love with my mother, even if he had been ever so good.  But I can’t help being sorry for him; he must have loved my mother so much, and he must have wasted his whole life; and then to die among strangers so suddenly, poor man.”