“I suppose I must. Will you be gone for long?”
“I can’t say. But I will write to you every day, and twice a day, if you like.”
“Will you? Will you really? I shall be miserable until you are safe home again. Richard”—she held me closer—“there is one thing yet which I haven’t dared to speak about—Mrs Dalston.”
With a woman’s sensitive intuition, she had found, and touched in sympathy, the real most poignant nerve of this complex tragedy. The point had not even occurred to Lord Skene.
“I understand what you mean, dearest,” I said softly. “If all surmise is justified, I am hounding to his doom the husband of my mother.”
“And she would wish it so, you believe?”
“I am bound to believe it.”
“O, Richard! is it not the most tragic thing of all that you should have wasted all your poor heart of love in pleading to a mother that was no mother to you, and, when the real one came, that you should have turned from her like a stranger?”
“It is the most tragic thing, Ira—and the worst that I cannot bring myself even now to look upon her as anything but Mrs Dalston.”
She sighed. “It is all a dreadful tangle. I wish it were unravelled and done with.”