I had not regarded it in that light, and I was fain to tell her so. I had come to visit Mother Carey. She started on the word, and a sudden terror flew to her eyes.
“Who’s your mammy?” she cried shrilly, stepping back. “Tell me—quick, now.”
“Lady Skene is my mother,” I said.
“Ah!”
Her self-confidence returned. It had struck her, “all of a heap,” how she might have been beguiled into admitting some villain with a design on her hoardings. She approached me again, curiously.
“Eh!” she wondered. “So this is my Georgie’s child, is it, the deuce? And how does your mammy treat you, my pretty?”
“Lady Skene has got another son now,” I said. “Didn’t you know it?”
“I hear nothing, and I know nothing in these days, dovey the devil,” she answered. “So long as I’m given my little provision as her mother, Georgie’s welcome to make out her own life as she pleases for me. We usen’t to get on very well together, not always, her and me. She’d come to me in her troubles, she would, like her father’s own gal; but most times we lived apart.”
“She came to you when she was in trouble about me, I suppose?” I said.
She conned me a little, unanswering. The wintry pupils of her eyes seemed to sharpen like a cat’s.