He could not answer that. Something new to him and incomprehensible, which had stirred within him at her pictured face, had centered all his interest on her. He had choked to think how pretty she was, with what tenderness and sweetness in her look, and he had coupled the name which he had supposed to be his father's unquestioningly with her.
He gazed at her doubtfully.
"Try to understand. I am not Mrs. Markyn. She was the other one. The other name belonged to me. I was Edith Markyn once; now I am Mrs. Cord."
He had trouble comprehending this reversal of his thought. Everything he had done regarding her since he first had seen her had been because he had believed her to be Walter's wife. He merely stared at her, as she kept on talking to him.
She was talking now, it appeared, about the other child—the one who had been burned. That child's father, Peewee gathered, had been a naval officer. In gun practice—whatever that might be—off some place called Porto Rico, he
