They stood facing each other while she tried to gather up the shattered fragments of her authority. She had said to herself that what lay before her was horrible beyond human imagining; but never once had she imagined that, if she had the strength to speak, he would have the strength to defy her. She opened her lips, but no sound came.
“You seem ready to think the worst of me; I suppose that’s natural,” he continued. “The best’s bad enough. But at any rate, before ordering me to go, perhaps you ought to know that I did go—once.”
She echoed the word blankly. “Once?”
He smiled a little. “You didn’t suppose—or did you?—that I’d drifted into this without a fight; a long fight? At the hospital, where I first met her, I hadn’t any idea who she was. I’m not a New Yorker; I knew nothing of your set of people in New York. You never spoke to me of her—I never even knew you had a daughter.”
It was true. In that other life she had led she had never spoken to any one of Anne. She had never been able to. From the time when she had returned to Europe, frustrated in her final attempt to get the child back, or even to have one last glimpse of her, to the day when her daughter’s cable had summoned her home, that daughter’s name had never been uttered by her except in the depths of her heart.
A darkness was about her feet; her head swam. She looked around her vaguely, and put out her hand for something to lean on. Chris Fenno moved a chair forward, and she sat down on it without knowing what she was doing.
He continued to stand in front of her. “You do believe me?” he repeated.
“Oh, yes—I believe you.” She was beginning to feel, now, the relief of finding him less base than he had at first appeared. She lifted her eyes to his. “But afterward—”
“Well; afterward—” He stopped, as if hoping she would help him to fill in the pause. But she made no sign, and he went on. “As I say, we met first in the hospital where she nursed me. It began there. Afterward she asked me to come and see her at her grandmother’s. It was only then that I found out—”
“Well, and then—?”