Mr. Sabin smiled faintly.
“Ah! Madame,” he said, “there have been so many people lately who have been asking me that question, yet to you as to them I must return the same answer. She is my niece!”
“You call her?”
“She shares my name at present.”
“Is she your daughter?”
He shook his head sadly.
“I have never been married,” he said, with an indefinable mournfulness in his flexible tones. “I have had neither wife, nor child, nor friend. It is well for me that I have not!”
She looked down at his deformity, and woman-like she shivered.
“It is no better, then?” she murmured, with eyes turned seaward.
“It is absolutely incurable,” he declared.