“Come inside,” she said suddenly, “and we can talk better. You must know everything now.”
CHAPTER XXIII.
A PHOTOGRAPH
Bayre followed Miss Merriman into the house, and into the little ground-floor sitting-room, where she turned up the gas and showed the folding doors open into the adjoining room, where a maid sat reading a novelette by the light of a candle beside the baby’s cot.
“Wait here a moment, I always go and kiss my baby the moment I come in; nothing can interfere with that ceremony,” she said, with a pretty defiance which Bayre liked.
And as she disappeared through the folding-doors, which she shut after her, her attitude seemed to say that now she had once owned that that baby was hers she would brandish him in the eyes of the world and snap her fingers at destiny.
Bayre heard the soft whisperings of the two women, the mysterious cooings and cawings they made over the sleeping child. And when Miss Merriman swept majestically back into the room again, dressed in a plain grey tea-gown, with one of her roses pinned in it, he remembered his old ideal of the simple, domestic-minded woman, and he sympathised with Southerley’s adoration of this beautiful creature.
“Now,” she said defiantly, “perhaps you’ll explain why you have followed me, why you have come.”
Bayre was rather amused, and rather resentful.
“You must remember,” said he, “that whatever suspicions I may have had concerning your relationship to the child, all that I absolutely knew was that he was my uncle’s son, and that therefore it was a personal duty of mine to know what became of him. My friends too, Repton and Southerley—” She interrupted him with a quick gesture.
“Surely,” she said, panting a little, “you can’t pretend they have a right to know anything whatever about me!”