"Honor!" interrupted Kate in her turn, "the less said about honor the better, surely, between you and me!"
The wide blue eyes looked at her doubtfully.
"I never can understand women like you," said their owner. "You pretend not to care, and then you make so much fuss over so little."
"So little!" retorted Kate, her temper rising. "Is it little that my boy should have to know this about his father--about me? You have no children, Mrs. Gissing! If you had you would understand the shame better. Oh! I know about the baby and the flowers--who doesn't? But that is nothing. It was so long ago, it died so young, you have forgotten----"
She broke off before the expression on the face before her--that face with the shadowless eyes, but with deep shadows beneath the eyes and a nameless look of physical strain and stress upon it--and a sudden pallor came to her own cheek.
"So he hasn't told you," came the high voice half-fretfully, half-pitifully. "That was very mean of him; but I thought, somehow, he couldn't by your coming here. Well! I suppose I must. Mrs. Erlton----"
Kate stepped back from her defiantly, angrily. "He has told me all I need, all I care to know about this miserable business. Yes! he has! You can see the letter if you like--there it is! I am not ashamed of it. It is a good letter, better than I thought he could write--better than you deserve. For he says he will marry you if I will let him! And he says he is sorry it can't be helped. But I deny that. It can, it must, it shall be helped! And then he says it's a pity for the boy's sake; but that it does not matter so much as if it was a girl----"
It was the queerest sound which broke in on those passionate reproaches. The queerest sound. Neither a laugh nor a sob, nor a cry; but something compounded of all three, infinitely soft, infinitely tender.
"And the other may be," said Alice Gissing in a voice of smiles and tears, as she pointed to the end of the sentence in the letter Kate had thrust upon her. "Poor dear! What a way to put it! How like a man to think you could understand; and I wonder what the old Mai would say to its being----"
What did she say? What were the frantic words which broke from the frantic figure, its sparse gray hair showing, its shriveled bosom heaving unveiled, which burst into the room and flung its arms round that little be-frilled white one as if to protect and shield it?