"I told no falsehood. You never asked me of my parentage."
"Nay," said John, interfering, "you must not speak in that manner to Mrs. Halifax. Why did you renounce your father's name?"
"Because English people would have scouted my father's daughter. You knew him—everybody knew him—he was D'Argent the Jacobin—D'Argent the Bonnet Rouge."
She threw out these words defiantly, and quitted the room.
"This is a dreadful discovery. Edwin, you have seen most of her—did you ever imagine—"
"I knew it, mother," said Edwin, without lifting his eyes from his book. "After all, French or English, it makes no difference."
"I should think not, indeed!" cried Guy, angrily. "Whatever her father is, if any one dared to think the worse of her—"
"Hush!—till another time," said the father, with a glance at Maud, who, with wide-open eyes, in which the tears were just springing, had been listening to all these revelations about her governess.
But Maud's tears were soon stopped, as well as this painful conversation, by the entrance of our daily, or rather nightly, visitor for these six weeks past, Lord Ravenel. His presence, always welcome, was a great relief now. We never discussed family affairs before people. The boys began to talk to Lord Ravenel: and Maud took her privileged place on a footstool beside him. From the first sight she had been his favourite, he said, because of her resemblance to Muriel. But I think, more than any fancied likeness to that sweet lost face, which he never spoke of without tenderness inexpressible, there was something in Maud's buoyant youth—just between childhood and girlhood, having the charms of one and the immunities of the other—which was especially attractive to this man, who, at three-and-thirty, found life a weariness and a burthen—at least, he said so.
Life was never either weary or burthensome in our house—not even to-night, though our friend found us less lively than usual—though John maintained more than his usual silence, and Mrs. Halifax fell into troubled reveries. Guy and Edwin, both considerably excited, argued and contradicted one another more warmly than even the Beechwood liberty of speech allowed. For Miss Silver, she did not appear again.