“Cannon? You don’t mean—”
“You remember Mrs Cannon, don’t you? Hilda Lessways? Now, Georgie, come and shake hands with Mr Clayhanger.”
But George would not.
Two.
“Indeed!” Edwin exclaimed, very feebly. He knew not whether his voice was natural or unnatural. He felt as if he had received a heavy blow with a sandbag over the heart: not a symbolic, but a real physical blow. He might, standing innocent in the street, have been staggeringly assailed by a complete stranger of mild and harmless appearance, who had then passed tranquilly on. Dizzy astonishment held him, to the exclusion of any other sentiment. He might have gasped, foolish and tottering: “Why—what’s the meaning of this? What’s happened?” He looked at the child uncomprehendingly, idiotically. Little by little—it seemed an age, and was in fact a few seconds—he resumed his faculties, and remembered that in order to keep a conventional self-respect he must behave in such a manner as to cause Janet to believe that her revelation of the child’s identity had in no way disturbed him. To act a friendly indifference seemed to him, then, to be the most important duty in life. And he knew not why.
“I thought,” he said in a low voice, and then he began again, “I thought you hadn’t been seeing anything of her, of Mrs Cannon, for a long time now.”
The child was climbing on a chair at the window that gave on the garden, absorbed in exploration and discovery, quite ignoring the adults. Either Janet had forgotten him, or she had no hope of controlling him and was trusting to chance that the young wild stag would do nothing too dreadful.
“Well,” she admitted, “we haven’t.” Her constraint recurred. Very evidently she had to be careful about what she said. There were reasons why even to Edwin she would not be frank. “I only brought him down from London yesterday.”
Edwin trembled as he put the question—
“Is she here too—Mrs Cannon?”