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 "A white baby, Barney?"

"I don't know. I didn't ask him. He didn't say. You see—you see—Miss Carew, it hadn't occurred to me then that I—"

"What, Barney?"

"That I might have been born on the Rock, Miss Carew."

"Barney!" Ethel rebuked him by his own name gently. "Barney!"

"You can't want me to call you—"

"I can't?"

"Ethel!" he said, hardly whispering it; but she heard. "Ethel!" he clenched his hands behind him, and she stepped farther back. "That's the I was born, I believe!"

"Let's believe it, Barney!"

"Miss Carew!"

"I don't mind believing it, Barney! It doesn't change you! Except to make you finer!"

"Finer?"

"Because you've had to do it all yourself! Don't you see how I—" she faltered a little and substituted—"how every one must admire you only more for that! Besides, my people are to blame."

"How do you mean?" he asked quickly.

"They must be; I don't know more than you do; oh, Barney, I've told you everything. But we both of us know together that my people—my grandfather and my uncle, at least—tried to harm you. Not to hurt you, perhaps; but they saw that Quinlan was killed before he could find you. Why? You hadn't done anything to any of my family; you hadn't even heard of them before you met me. It was what you were—because you were that baby born