‘No, she hasn’t. It wouldn’t have been safe, you see.’
‘Give me the corkscrew, and I’ll open this bottle of whisky. It takes it out of a fellow, this kind of thing. Here’s to you, Mrs. Clem! Have a drink? All right; go downstairs and show your mother you’re alive still; and let me know when Jane comes. I want to think a bit.’
When he had sat for a quarter of an hour in solitary reflection the door opened, and Clem led into the room a young girl, whose face expressed timid curiosity. Joseph James stood up, joined his hands under his coat-tail, and examined the stranger.
‘Do you know who it is?’ asked Clem of her companion.
‘Your husband—but I don’t know his name.’
‘You ought to, it seems to me,’ said Clem, giggling. ‘Look at him.’
Jane tried to regard the man for a moment. Her cheeks flushed with confusion. Again she looked at him, and the colour rapidly faded. In her eyes was a strange light of painfully struggling recollection. She turned to Clem, and read her countenance with distress.
‘Well, I’m quite sure I should never have known you, Janey,’ said Snowdon, advancing. ‘Don’t you remember your father?’
Yes; as soon as consciousness could reconcile what seemed impossibilities Jane had remembered him. She was not seven years old when he forsook her, and a life of anything but orderly progress had told upon his features. Nevertheless Jane recognised the face she had never had cause to love, recognised yet more certainly the voice which carried her back to childhood. But what did it all mean? The shock was making her heart throb as it was wont to do before her fits of illness. She looked about her with dazed eyes.
‘Sit down, sit down,’ said her father, not without a note of genuine feeling. ‘It’s been a bit too much for you—like something else was for me just now. Put some water in that glass, Clem; a drop of this will do her good.’