"Ah, don't let us fence with the truth. I have always seen it coming, and why should I lie about it, now that it is come? When one is as tired as I am, there is only one other thing which happens—one dies. You don't suppose I should have sent for you like this if it hadn't been so?"
He lay very still for a moment or two with his eyes closed, as if the effort which speech cost him was considerable. At last he said abruptly:
"There are things you should know; she is Lightmark's child."
Oswyn had seated himself on a low chair by the bed; he kept his head averted, as does a priest who hears confessions; and he gazed with absent eyes at the fire which burned sulkily, at the row of medicine-bottles on the mantelpiece, at all the dreary paraphernalia of a sick-room.
"Yes, she is Lightmark's child," continued Rainham; "and the mother was that girl whom we found two years ago—do you remember?—the night of your first visit here outside the gates. She called herself Mrs. Crichton. It's a miserable story; I only discovered it quite recently."
Oswyn drew in a deep breath, which sounded like a sigh in the strangely still room.
It did not so much suggest surprise as the indefinable relief which a man feels when accident permits him to express cognizance of some fact of which he has long been inwardly assured.
"I knew that long ago," he said at last. "I suspected it when I first saw the girl; but I said nothing to you at the time; perhaps I was wrong. Afterwards, when we knew each other better, there seemed no occasion; I had almost forgotten the episode."
"Yes," went on the other faintly; "we have all made mistakes—I more than most folk, perhaps."
Then he asked suddenly: