“I suppose you won’t part with your secret?” he asked drily.
It was a habit with Valentine, not his least aggravating, composedly to put by any unwelcome or difficult question addressed to him as if he did not hear it.
“Skene’s in Kent, isn’t it?” he asked, ostensibly of the aunt, though he looked at me. I could have snapped at him in pure vindictiveness. He wasn’t inscrutable, any more than another. What was his confounded right to pose as a sphinx?
“She fancies she’s there,” he said. “Why?”
I turned dumbly with the question to the little woman creature. I don’t know if she supposed I was in some sort of official authority to cross-examine her. She had powder on her face, and a weak glow mantled through it.
“It was there she met her trouble, sir,” she said, hesitating. “She’d gone down to the hop-picking last September, and I was to follow. But circumstances” (she wriggled her shoulders with an indescribable simper) “was against my joining her.”
“Well,” broke in C——, suddenly and rather sharply, “you must take the consequences, and, for the present anyhow, the burden of them off her shoulders.”
“Begging your pardon, sir?” she questioned shrewdly.
“The child,” said the doctor, “the child. Everything, it appears, relating to it is for the moment obliterated from her mind. She takes up existence, I think you’ll find, last autumn, at this Skene, with expecting you. Well, you have come, and returned to London together. You understand? The time of year is the same. None of all this has for the moment happened.”
There was an acrid incredulity in his hearer’s face as she listened to him.