“I had never heard of her,” she continued, “until I was called upon to take her as my own child. Then she was sent to me from people who had had the care of her since she was three years old.”
Asquith slowly nodded, wrinkling his forehead.
“Well, we will speak no more of that. What I wish to ask you to do for me is this:—Oh, I am ashamed to speak of it! It is something that I ought to have done myself already. But I am a coward; I have always been a coward. I can’t face the consequences of my own—my own baseness; that is the true word. Will you tell Ada Warren what her real position is, and what mine?”
Asquith raised his head in astonishment.
“She is still ignorant?”
“I have every reason to believe so. I don’t think any one will have told her.”
Robert bit his upper lip.
“Has she never asked questions about her origin?”
“Yes, but only once. I told her that her parents were friends of Mr. Clarendon, and that she was an orphan, therefore I had taken her. That was several years ago.”
Again there was a pause in the dialogue. Isabel had difficulty in keeping her face raised; her cheeks had lost their pallor, the blood every now and then made them warm.