That answer calmed Dolly’s mind a little. She began to think after all—if Walter still wanted her—she loved him very much; she could hardly dismiss him.
When she rose to go to bed, Herminia, very wistful, held out her white face to be kissed as usual. She held it out tentatively. Worlds trembled in the balance; but Dolly drew herself back with a look of offended dignity. “Never!” she answered in a firm voice. “Never again while I live. You are not fit to receive a pure girl’s kisses.”
And two women lay awake all that ensuing night sobbing low on their pillows in the Marylebone lodging-house.
CHAPTER XXII
It was half-past nine o’clock next morning when the manservant at Sir Anthony Merrick’s in Harley Street brought up to his master’s room a plain hand-written card on which he read the name, “Dolores Barton.”
“Does the girl want to blackmail me?” Sir Anthony thought testily.
The great doctor’s old age was a lonely and a sordid one. He was close on eighty now, but still to this day he received his patients from ten to one, and closed his shrivelled hand with a clutch on their guineas. For whom, nobody knew. Lady Merrick was long dead. His daughters were well married, and he had quarrelled with their husbands. Of his two younger sons, one had gone into the Fusiliers and been speared at Suakim; the other had broken his neck on a hunting-field in Warwickshire. The old man lived alone, and hugged his money-bags. They were the one thing left for which he seemed to retain any human affection.
So, when he read Dolly’s card, being by nature suspicious, he felt sure the child had called to see what she could get out of him.
But when he descended to the consulting-room with stern set face, and saw a beautiful girl of seventeen awaiting him—a tall sunny-haired girl, with Alan’s own smile and Alan’s own eyes—he grew suddenly aware of an unexpected interest. The sun went back on the dial of his life for thirty years or thereabouts, and Alan himself seemed to stand before him. Alan, as he used to burst in for his holidays from Winchester! After all, this pink rosebud was his eldest son’s only daughter.