“My dear Winston! what a question!  Haven’t I told you that he is my husband’s namesake and godson!  I was at his fathers house a score of times, at least, in dear Frederic’s life-time.  It was a charming place, and I never saw a more lovely family.  I recollect this boy perfectly, as was very natural, seeing that his name was such a compliment to my husband.  He was a fine, manly little fellow, and the eldest son.  The christening-feast was postponed, for some reason I do not now remember, until he was two years old.  It was a very fine affair.  The company was composed of the very elite of that part of Maryland, and the Bishop himself baptized the two babies—­Frederic, and a younger sister.  I know all about him, you see, instead of nothing!”

“What was the date of this festival?” asked Winston’s unwavering voice.

“Let me see!  We had been married seven years that fall.  It must have been in the winter of 18—.”

“Twenty-three years ago!” said Winston, yet more quietly.  “Doubtless, your intimacy with this estimable and distinguished family continued up to the time of your husband’s death?”

“It did.”

“And afterward?”

Mrs. Button’s color waned, And her voice sank, as the inquisition proceeded.  “Dear Frederic’s” death was not the subject she would have chosen of her free will to discuss with this man of steel and ice.

“I never visited them again.  I could not—­”

If she hoped to retain a semblance of composure, she must shift her ground.

“I returned to my father’s house, which was, as you know, more remote from the borders of Maryland—­”

“You kept up a correspondence, perhaps?” Winston interposed, overlooking her agitation as irrelevant to the matter under investigation.

“No!  For many months I wrote no letters at all, and Mr. Chilton was never a punctual correspondent.  The best of friends are apt to be dilatory in such respects, as they advance in life.”

“I gather, then, from what you have admitted”—­there was no actual stress upon the word, but it stood obnoxiously apart from the remainder of the sentence, to Mrs. Sutton’s auriculars—­“from what you have admitted, that for twenty years you have lost sight of this gentleman and his relatives, and that you might never have remembered the circumstance of their existence, had he not introduced himself to you at the Springs this summer.”

“You are mistaken, there!” corrected the widow, eagerly.  “Rosa Tazewell introduced him to Mabel at the first ‘hop’ she—­Mabel—­attended there.  He is very unassuming.  He would never have forced himself upon my notice.  I was struck by his appearance and resemblance to his father, and inquired of Mabel who he was.  The recognition followed as a matter of course.”

“He was an acquaintance of Miss Tazewell—­did you say?”

“Yes—­she knew him very well when she was visiting in Philadelphia last winter.”