'Who?' Margaret vaguely guessed the truth.
'Who? Tom—my son! "Edmund Lushington," who feels that he cannot ask a respectable girl to marry him because his mother has been a wicked woman.'
The big woman shook from head to foot as she spoke.
Margaret was pained and her fingers tightened nervously on the other's wrist.
'Oh, please don't!' she cried. 'Please don't!'
'He's right,' answered Madame Bonanni, hanging her large head and shaking it despairingly. 'Of course, he's right, and it's true! But, oh!—she looked up again, suddenly—'oh, how much more right it must be for a man to forgive his mother, no matter what she has done!'
Margaret's fingers glided from the wrist they held, to the large hand, and pressed it sympathetically, but she could not find anything to say which would do. The friendly pressure, however, evidently meant enough to the distressed woman.
'Thank you, dear,' she said gratefully. 'You're very good to me. I know you mean it, too. Only, you're not placed as he is. If you were my daughter, you would think as he thinks—you would not live under my roof! Perhaps you would not even see me when we met in the street! You would look the other way!'
Margaret could not have told, for her life, what she would have done, but she was far too kind-hearted not to protest.
'Indeed I wouldn't!' she cried, with so much energy that Madame Bonanni believed her.