“Then I disapprove of his nerves,” rejoined her father.  “Good-night, Philip, my boy!”

“Good-night!” said Philip.

He was looking at Adare’s wife as they moved away.  In the dim light of the hall a strange look had come into her face at her husband’s jesting words.  Was it the effect of the shadows, or had he seen her start—­almost as if for an instant she had been threatened by a blow?  Was it imagination, or had he in that same instant caught a sudden look of alarm, of terror, in her eyes?  Josephine had told him that her mother knew nothing of the tragedy of the child’s birth.  If this were so, why had she betrayed the emotions which Philip was sure he had seen?

A chaotic tangle of questions and of doubts rushed through his mind.  John Adare alone had acted a natural and unrestrained part in the brief space that had intervened since his home-coming.  Philip had looked upon the big man’s love and happiness, his worship of the woman who was his wife, his ecstasy over the baby, his affection for Josephine, and it seemed to him that he knew this man now.  The few moments he had stood in the room with mother and daughter had puzzled him most.  In their faces he had seen no sign of gladness at their reunion, and he asked himself if Josephine had told him all the truth—­if her mother were not, after all, a partner to her secret.

And then there swept upon him in all its overwhelming cloud of mystery that other question which until now he had not dared to ask himself:  Had Josephine herself told him all the truth?  He did not dare to tell himself that it was possible that she was not the mother of the child which she had told him was her own.  And yet he could not kill the whispering doubt deep back in his brain.  It had come to him in the room, quick as a flashlight, when she had made her confession; it was insistent now as he stood looking at the closed door through which they had disappeared.

For him to believe wholly and unquestioned Josephine’s confession was like asking him to believe that da Vinci’s masterpiece hanging in the big room had been painted by a blind man.  In her he had embodied all that he had ever dreamed of as pure and beautiful in a woman, and the thought came now.  Had Josephine, for some tremendous reason known only to herself and Jean, tried to destroy his great love for her by revealing herself in a light that was untrue?

Instantly he told himself that this could not be so.  If he believed in Josephine at all, he must believe that she had told him the truth.  And he did believe, in spite of the whispering doubt.  He felt that he could not sleep until he had seen Josephine alone.  In her room John Adare had interrupted them a minute too soon.  In spite of the mysterious and unsettling events of the night his heart still beat with the wild and joyous hope that had come with Josephine’s surrender to his arms and lips.