Miss Carol shook her head decisively, and said:
"No. I had one once in a locket, but when I went home and found she'd gone away and left me all alone in Paris—that's where we were then—I was so angry that I took it out and tore it up. I daresay it was very wrong of me, but I couldn't help it, and to tell you the honest truth, I can't say that I ever was as fond of her as a daughter should have been."
"I don't wonder at it," said Sir Arthur, with a sigh.
Miss Carol looked up wonderingly as he said this, but he took no notice and said:
"But I suppose you would recognise a photograph of her if you saw one?"
"Yes, if it was taken anywhere about the time that I knew her."
"Quite so," said Sir Arthur, taking a leather letter-case out of his pocket. "This was taken quite twenty years ago, a year or two after we were married, in short. It is, or was, my wife."
As he took out the photograph he got up, crossed the room, and held it out to her. Miss Carol got up too, and as she took it she saw that his hand was trembling. She took the old-fashioned, faded photograph and looked at it. He saw that her face flushed as she did so. She gave it back to him and said simply:
"Yes, that is my mother."
As he took the photograph from her he looked at her with sad, grave eyes across the gulf of sin and shame in which the one great love of his life had been lost. She was the daughter of his wife, and yet she was not his daughter—and she was an outcast. The sting of the old shame came back very keenly. The old wound was already open and bleeding again. All the pride and hope and love of his life were centred now on his brilliant son. A few hours before he had learnt that his mother had transmitted to him the terrible, perhaps the fatal taint of inherited alcoholism; and now he had just proved beyond doubt that Vane's half-sister—for she was that in blood if not in law—was what she had just so frankly, so defiantly even, admitted herself to be.