Everett made as if to strike her.

“Get back, I say!  I would hate you if you were my mother!  You can’t fool me with your charlatan tricks!”

The woman sank down, whimpering.

Again Everett sprang forward; but again the cat drove him back.

“Go—­go—­now!” he muttered.  “I can’t bear the sight of you!”

There were tones in his voice that reminded Scraggy of Lem, and her heart grew tender as she thought of the father waiting for his child.

“Ye won’t hate yer pappy, if he does hate me.  He wants ye, little ’un.  I’ve come to take ye back to yer hum.  He won’t hurt ye no more.”

Everett stared at her wildly.  Was the delicious mystery that had surrounded him for so many years, which had occupied his mind hour upon hour, to end in this?  He would not have it so!

“Get up, then,” he said, his lips whitening, “and tell me what you have to say.”

Scraggy lifted herself up.  Her boy wanted to hear more about his father, she thought.

“I gived ye to the pretty lady with the golden hair when yer pappy hurt ye, and I knowed ye again; for the Brimbecomb’s name was on the boat that took ye.  Yer pappy didn’t know ye were a livin’ till a little while ago, and he wants ye now.”

“Were you married to him, this man you call my father?” demanded Everett.

Scraggy shook her head.

“But that don’t make ye none the less his’n, an’ ye be goin’ with me, ye be!”

Everett no longer hoped that the woman was either mistaken or lying.  The stamp of truth was on all she had said.  He knew in his heart that he was in the presence of his mother—­this ragged human thing with wild, dark eyes and straggling hair.  And somewhere he had a father who was as evil as she looked.  For years Everett had struggled against the bad in his nature; but at that moment he lost all the remembrance of the lessons of his youth, of the goodness taught him by his foster father and mother.  It flashed into his mind how embarrassed Mrs. Brimbecomb had been when he had constantly brought up the subject of his own family, and how impatiently Mr. Brimbecomb had waved aside his petitions for information.  They should never know that he had found out the secret of his birth, and he breathed thanks that they were not now in Tarrytown.  Neither Ann nor Horace should ever learn of the stain upon him; but the girl with the black curls should make good to him the suffering of his new-found knowledge!  She came of a stock like himself, of blood in which there was no good.

Everett forgot the dripping woman before him as a dark thought leaped into his mind.  He could now be at ease with his conscience!  Of a sudden, he felt himself sink from the radius of Horace Shellington’s life—­down to the birth level of the boy and girl next door.  It dawned upon him, as his mind swept back over his boyhood days, that Horace had ever been better than he, with a natural abhorrence against evil.