“You’ll sit down, my dear—won’t you?” Marian pleaded at length in a trembling voice. “You won’t mind sitting down here, just for a little?”
Joan allowed herself to be led to the big arm-chair of old-fashioned shape, commonly occupied by the old farmer—her grandfather. She sat in it, upright and pale, like one in a dream. Marian stood in front, gazing and gazing as if her eyes could not have their fill.
“I want to know if this is really true?” Joan said at length, speaking with a resolute composure. “It was old Mr. Brooke who told me.”
Marian was surprised at the question. Joan’s manner hitherto had implied no sort of doubt; and Joan, looking up, read her expression. “I know—I know,” she said bitterly. “Of course it is true—really. I haven’t any hope—really—of finding it a mistake. But he said you could tell me all about it. And I have come to ask.”
“Mr. Brooke’s son, Hubert, was my husband,” Marian said.
“Yes, so he told me. And you are my—”
Then a pause. Marian’s face worked.
“What made you give me up?” asked Joan suddenly. “If you had loved me, and kept me with you, I should have been your child now. I should have learnt to care for you. Now I am Mr. and Mrs. Rutherford’s child. I love them dearly, dearly, and I should be miserable away from them. Father is everything in the world to me. And it was your doing. You gave me up of your own free will; gave me over to them. It was a wrong, unjust thing to do. You did not deserve that they should keep me; but they did, and they were strangers—and you were my mother. And now I owe everything to them—not to you—nothing at all to you.”
Marian’s tears were streaming, and voice failed her for self-defence, if indeed she had any to offer.
“Father is ill, and he has a fancy that you will expect to be able to claim me as your own child,” Joan went on feverishly. “That is what I have come to speak about to-day. I want your help.”