"Oh, Charlie," she said wistfully. "Don't be angry. This is my life—my secret.... Leave me to do as seems best to me.... Tell me," she said softly, "how did you know that my child ... is ... his son?"
"Know? Why, anyone would know. He is the dead image—and there are Eve Carson's eyes staring at me. No two men in the world have eyes like that."
"Are they not beautiful? And yet so strange!—one blue and one brown! I never—" she stopped suddenly. She had almost told Bramham that she did not know that Carson's eyes looked thus, since she had never seen them, except in the darkness. But much as she liked Bramham, she could not share with him that strange, sweet secret.
Only one more question Bramham asked her.
"Was it Karri you told me of that night, Rosalind?—the man you loved?"
"Yes," she said. "The only man I have ever loved, or will love."
She dined with Bramham, after all, and before they parted she had bound him by every oath he honoured never to reveal her secret to Carson.
"If you do," she passionately told him, "you may precipitate both him and me into terrible misery, and neither of us would forgive you. We should probably hate you for ever. Leave alone things that you do not understand.... How should you understand! You have accidentally touched on the fringe of a strange story ... something you would never have known except by accident. For I don't intend the world to know this when it knows me some day, Charlie."
"Why?" said he, looking keenly at her. "Are you ashamed of your child?"
"Ashamed!" she laughed happily. "Ashamed of the greatest joy that ever came to a woman; the son of the man she loves!"