“There you’re wrong. It was Pugsley rescued her, as he called it, when she’d returned to them after your little affair, and who trimmed her up and made her meat for his lordship.”
“That you bought me my name of a publican—his name—for a pint of beer,” I continued.
She admitted that frankly, with a giggle.
“You had to have one, you know, deary. And to give you your mother’s might have let out things. And hasn’t this fine lordship, now, ever shown any curiosity about who was your father?”
“No,” I said. “The curiosity is all mine. Who was he?”
“I don’t know,” she proclaimed blankly, and at once.
“You do,” I said sternly.
“No, I don’t,” she answered, suddenly truculent. “Why should I, now? The gal came to her mother in her trouble—that was all it mattered to me. She wouldn’t confess to the author of her shame, not she. She was always one of the silent sort. Ask the old deuce of a doctor, now—old Patterson, drat him—if he could ever get a word out of her.”
“I believe you are lying. I’ll pay you, I say.”
She skipped to her feet, with a little blasphemous screech.