“My God!” I cried. “I remember now. It was you that had the care of me when I was a baby!”
“Ah!” she piped. “It was me, was it, Richard? And to think you should have growed to this, and all the understanding in you!”
“Wasn’t it you, I say?”
“You may say it with truth, dovey,” she answered. “She wanted me to adopt you altogether, did my daughter; but I just struck when I found I wasn’t to be included in her ladyship’s promotion. But I made her pay for it, I did—more than if I’d kept you; and then she and Pugsley had to put their deuced heads together, and account for you to his lordship in their own way.”
“Yes,” I said. “I know that.”
“You know it?” She lowered her frowzy noddle, mumbling to herself; then looked up fulsomely.
“Tell old Mother Carey, my pretty,” she coaxed, “just exactly how much you do know.”
“That you were on the stage——” I began.
“Ah!” she leered across at the photographs on the wall; her horrible old feet drummed on the floor. “The stage, to be sure! My daughter could never come anigh me as a dancer—no, nor in looks, for that matter. There’s nothing criminal in being on the stage, ducky dear; and Georgie herself was born in wedlock.”
“That Lady Skene was taken from the boards by her husband,” I went on; but she interrupted me: