Dr. Alden well," she went on. "He's operated on me twice, and I've spent
weeks in his hospital. When he tells me it's best for my head to come
off--off my head is to come. And when a man can make people feel that
way about him, he isn't the kind that's not square on four sides.

"I tell you, he doesn't know about this child. He's often talked to me
about Yorkburg, knowing you were my cousin. He told me of his sister
running away with an actor and marrying him, and dying a year later.
Also of his father's death and the sale of the old home, and of many
other things. There's no place on earth he loves as he does Virginia. He
doesn't come back because there's no one to come to see specially. No
real close kin, I mean. The changes in the place where you were born
make a man lonelier than a strange city does, and something seems to
keep him away."

"You say he doesn't know his sister left a child?" Mrs. Moon put down
the needle she was trying to thread, and stuck it in her work. "Why
doesn't he know?"

"Why should he? Who was there to tell him, if a bunch of women made up
their minds he shouldn't know? He wrote to his sister again and again,
but whether his letters ever reached her he never knew. He thinks not,
as it was unlike her not to write if they were received.

"Travelling from place to place with her actor husband, who, he said,
was a 'younger son Englishman,' the letters probably miscarried, and not
for months after her death did he know she was dead."

"We didn't, either," interrupted Mrs. Moon. "In fact, we heard it
through Parke, who went West after his father's death. He wrote Roy