His own origins--his own story--as to that she had nothing to discover.

But the man who might have dared to love her, up to that moment in the hut, was now a slave, bound to a corpse-- _Finis_! And then as the anguish of the thought swept through him, and by a natural transmission of ideas, there rose in Anderson the sore and sudden memory of old, unhappy things, of the tender voices and faces of his first youth.

The ugly vision of his degraded father had brought back upon him, through a thousand channels of association, the recollection of his mother.

He saw her now--the worn, roughened face, the sweet swimming eyes; he felt her arms around him, the tears of her long agony on his face.

She had endured--he too must endure.