“Then I wish to speak to you about my son.”

“Your—­what?” demanded Hannah, with a frown as black as midnight.

“My son,” repeated Herman Brudenell, with emphasis.

“Your son?  What son?  I didn’t know you had a son!  What should I know about your son?”

“Woman, stop this!  I speak of my son, Ishmael Worth—­whom I met for the first time in the courtroom yesterday!  And I ask you how it has fared with him these many years?” demanded Mr. Brudenell sternly, for he was beginning to lose patience with Hannah.

“Oh—­h!  So you met Ishmael Worth in the courtroom yesterday, just when he had proved himself to be the most talented man there, did you?  That accounts for it all.  I understand it now!  You could leave him in his helpless, impoverished, orphaned infancy to perish!  You could utterly neglect him, letting him suffer with cold and hunger and sickness for years and years and years!  And now that, by the blessing of Almighty God, he has worked himself up out of that horrible pit into the open air of the world; and now that from being a poor, despised outcast babe he has risen to be a man of note among men; now, forsooth, you want to claim him as your son!  Herman Brudenell, I always hated you, but now I scorn you!  Twenty odd years ago I would have killed you, only I didn’t want to kill your soul as well as your body, nor likewise to be hanged for you!  And now I would shy this stick of wood at your head only that I don’t want Reuben Gray to have the mortification of seeing his wife took up for assault!  But I hate you, Herman Brudenell!  And I despise you!  There! take yourself out of my sight!”

Mr. Brudenell stamped impatiently and said: 

“Hannah, you speak angrily, and therefore, foolishly.  What good could accrue to me, or to him, by my claiming Ishmael as my son, unless I could prove a marriage with his mother?  It would only unearth the old, cruel, unmerited scandal now forgotten!  No, Hannah; to you only, who are the sole living depository of the secret, will I solace myself by speaking of him as my son!  You reproach me with having left him to perish.  I did not so.  I left in your hands a check for several—­I forget how many—­thousand dollars to be used for his benefit.  And I always hoped that he was well provided for until yesterday, when Judge Merlin, little thinking the interest I had in the story, gave me a sketch of Ishmael’s early sufferings and struggles.  And now I ask you what became of that check?”

“That check?  What check?  What in the world do you mean?”

“The check for several thousand dollars which I gave you on the day of my departure, to be used for Ishmael’s benefit.”

“Well, Herman Brudenell!  I always thought, with all your faults, you were still a man of truth; but after this—­”

And Hannah finished by lifting her hands and eyes in horror.

“Hannah, you do severely try my temper, but in memory of all your kindness to my son—­”