Lord Coombe still sat silent. What he was thinking could not be read in his face but being a man of astute perception and used to the study of faces Dr. Redcliff knew that suddenly some startling thought had leaped within him.
"You were right to come to me," he said. "What is it you—suspect?"
That Dr. Redcliff was almost unbearably moved was manifest. He was not a man of surface emotions but his face actually twitched and he hastily gulped something down.
"She is a heartbreakingly beautiful thing," he said. "She has been left—through sheer kindness—in her own young hands. They were too young—and these are hours of cataclysm. She knows nothing. She does not know that—she will probably have a child."
CHAPTER XV
The swiftness of the process by which the glowing little Miss Lawless, at whom people had found themselves involuntarily looking so often, changed from a rose of a girl into something strangely like a small waxen image which walked, called forth frequent startled comment. She was glanced at even oftener than ever.
"Is she going into galloping consumption? Her little chin has grown quite pointed and her eyes are actually frightening," was an early observation. But girls who are going into galloping consumption cough and look hectic and are weaker day by day and she had no cough, nor was she hectic and, though it was known that Dr. Redcliff saw her frequently, she insisted that she was not ill and begged the Duchess to let her go on with her work.
"But the done-for woe in her face is inexplicable—in a girl who has had no love affairs and has not even known any one who could have flirted with her and ridden away. The little thing's done for. It cries out aloud. I can't bear to look at her," one woman protested.