so when I mention Bart’s name and gits so flustered, that’s why I dar’n’t tell her.  Now he’s dead there won’t be nobody to do right by Archie.  I can’t; I’m all muzzled up tight.  She made me take an oath, same as she has you, and I ain’t goin’ to break it any more’n you would.  The little feller’ll have to git ’long best way he kin now.”

Doctor John bent forward in his chair and looked at the captain curiously.  His words convey no meaning to him.  For an instant he thought that the shock of his son’s death had unsettled the man’s mind.

“Take an oath!  What for?”

“’Bout Archie and herself.”

“But I’ve taken no oath!”

“Well, perhaps it isn’t your habit; it ain’t some men’s.  I did.”

“What about?”

It was the captain’s turn now to look searchingly into his companion’s face.  The doctor’s back was toward the lamp, throwing his face into shadow, but the captain could read its expression plainly.

“You mean to tell me, doctor, you don’t know what’s goin’ on up at Yardley?  You do, of course, but you won’t say—­that’s like you doctors!”

“Yes, everything.  But what has your son Bart got to do with it?”

“Got to do with it!  Ain’t Jane Cobden motherin’ his child?”

The doctor lunged forward in his seat, his eyes staring straight at the captain.  Had the old sailor struck him in the face he could not have been more astounded.

“His child!” he cried savagely.

“Certainly!  Whose else is it?  You knew, didn’t ye?”

The doctor settled back in his chair with the movement of an ox felled by a sudden blow.  With the appalling news there rang in his ears the tones of his mother’s voice retailing the gossip of the village.  This, then, was what she could not repeat.

After a moment he raised his head and asked in a low, firm voice: 

“Did Bart go to Paris after he left here?”

“No, of course not!  Went ’board the Corsair bound for Rio, and has been there ever since.  I told you that before.  There weren’t no necessity for her to meet him in Paris.”

The doctor sprang from his chair and with eyes biasing and fists tightly clenched, stood over the captain.

“And you dare to sit there and tell me that Miss Jane Cobden is that child’s mother?”

The captain struggled to his feet, his open hands held up to the doctor as if to ward off a blow.

“Miss Jane!  No, by God!  No!  Are you crazy?  Sit down, sit down, I tell ye!”

“Who, then?  Speak!”

“Lucy!  That’s what I drove Bart out for.  Mort Cobden’s daughter—­Mort, mind ye, that was a brother to me since I was a boy!  Jane that that child’s mother!  Yes, all the mother poor Archie’s got!  Ask Miss Jane, she’ll tell ye.  Tell ye how she sits and eats her heart out to save her sister that’s too scared to come home.  I want to cut my tongue out for tellin’ ye, but I thought ye knew.  Martha told me you loved her and that she loved you, and I thought she’d told ye.  Jane Cobden crooked!  No more’n the angels are.  Now, will you tell her Bart’s dead, or shall I?”