inating more than twenty years ago upon the Board of Trade." He looked at the date upon the clipping—"September 12, 1913"—and stopped to think.
The facts of birth were known to him, not uncertainly as to most children, but definitely; for he had heard them discussed without reserve. He did not know exactly when he had been born, but the ages of young children can be closely told, and he had learned during his appearances in court that, when he had been assigned to the orphan asylum, he must have been not over two. He had not been born, then, when this marriage had taken place. His father—was it his father?—had had a wife; a—what did the headlines call new wives?—a bride. What part in this, then, had been borne by the woman who had died on the West Side? It must be, surely, that she had been only "nuts." She could not be his mother; or else this Walter Wendell Markyn could not be his father.
The other boy, having finished his errand, had come back and was observing him.
