She rose restlessly and stood near the fireplace.
“I didn’t want you to know, I didn’t want anybody to know. I was so afraid of losing my boy again. I lost him by a trick before as perhaps you know, perhaps Mr Bayre told you. And so I hid my own name, for fear they might get to know at Creux that I had got my child back. Though I don’t think they’d have cared. Isn’t it wonderful—that they shouldn’t have cared?”
It seemed to Southerley, now standing at the other corner by the mantelpiece, that the look of maternal love which shone in her eyes as she asked this question was the most beautiful expression he had ever seen on a woman’s face.
“You mean that old Mr Bayre didn’t care?”
“Yes. Think of it! For weeks he never went near the cottage where he believed his child to be! Oh, I could have forgiven him everything but that!”
“You’ll have to forgive him that too, now,” said Southerley, with a sort of gruff gentleness.
She looked frightened.
“Oh, perhaps he’s not really so ill,” said she, in a whisper. “I don’t want him to be ill.”
She meant more than that, and Southerley understood the pangs in the woman’s heart. Even at the price of freedom for herself she did not want him to die.
“If he gets well you’ll stay there, I suppose?” said Southerley, pulling himself together and trying to speak in the tone of a conveyancing clerk during business hours.