"Not dare! By what right do you call this gentleman 'papa'?" she
passionately demanded of the child.

"Mamma told me to. She would never let me come home to him before
because of not wishing to part from me."

Mrs. Hamlyn gazed at him. "Where were you born?"

"At Calcutta; that's in India. Mamma brought me home in the _Clipper of
the Seas_, and the ship went down, but quite everybody was not lost in
it, though papa thought so."

The boy had evidently been well instructed. Eliza Hamlyn, grasping the
whole truth now, staggered back in terror.

"Philip! Philip! is it true? Was it _this_ you feared?"

He made a motion of assent and covered his face. "Heaven knows I would
rather have died."

He stood back against the window-curtains, that they might shade his
pain. She fell into a chair and wished he _had_ died, years before.

But what was to be the end of it all? Though Eliza Hamlyn went straight
out and despatched that syren of the golden hair with a poison-tipped
bodkin (and possibly her will might be good to do it), it could not make
things any the better for herself.