pert's cracked, puffed lips had burned him. She clutched him as she controlled her sobs.
"I'd brought back with me, dear, your father's things—even my own letters which he had saved. I'd kept them all these years. Thank God for that, for on one of them were the print marks of your baby fingers. Except for those we never could have been sure."
He was not sure that he wanted her to be his mother. What he wanted was that she should be toward him as she had always been, and he did not know exactly how a mother was. Edith raised her eyes, bright with her tears, to Beman.
"And except for you," she said to the old man, "we never should have found out about him."
"It was the likeness," Beman said. "Inquiry about the woman led me to the coroner's man. When he told me she had never had a child the boy's likeness to Walter became inexplicable. Then the boy's record showed the coincidence of dates. It is no more remarkable for him to look like his uncle than if he had looked like his father."
