'No; don't take trouble to say more. You are a dear honest fellow to say so much as you have; and it is not so dreadful either. It has become a normal thing that millionaires commence by going up to London with their tools at their back, and half-a-crown in their pockets. That sort of origin is getting so respected,' she continued cheerfully, 'that it is acquiring some of the odour of Norman ancestry.'
'Ah, if I had MADE my fortune, I shouldn't mind. But I am only a possible maker of it as yet.'
'It is quite enough. And so THIS is what your trouble was?'
'I thought I was doing wrong in letting you love me without telling you my story; and yet I feared to do so, Elfie. I dreaded to lose you, and I was cowardly on that account.'
'How plain everything about you seems after this explanation! Your peculiarities in chess-playing, the pronunciation papa noticed in your Latin, your odd mixture of book-knowledge with ignorance of ordinary social accomplishments, are accounted for in a moment. And has this anything to do with what I saw at Lord Luxellian's?'
'What did you see?'
'I saw the shadow of yourself putting a cloak round a lady. I was at the side door; you two were in a room with the window towards me. You came to me a moment later.'
'She was my mother.'
'Your mother THERE!' She withdrew herself to look at him silently in her interest.
'Elfride,' said Stephen, 'I was going to tell you the remainder to-morrow--I have been keeping it back--I must tell it now, after all. The remainder of my revelation refers to where my parents are. Where do you think they live? You know them--by sight at any rate.'
'I know them!' she said in suspended amazement.
'Yes. My father is John Smith, Lord Luxellian's master-mason, who lives under the park wall by the river.'
'O Stephen! can it be?'
'He built--or assisted at the building of the house you live in, years ago. He put up those stone gate piers at the lodge entrance to Lord Luxellian's park. My grandfather planted the trees that belt in your lawn; my grandmother--who worked in the fields with him--held each tree upright whilst he filled in the earth: they told me so when I was a child. He was the sexton, too, and dug many of the graves around us.'
'And was your unaccountable vanishing on the first morning of your arrival, and again this afternoon, a run to see your father and mother?...I understand now; no wonder you seemed to know your way about the village!'