“’Arf sister,” said Mrs. Pybus. “Of a sort. Neither ’ere nor there, so to speak. Not in the eyes of the law. And there they are—leastways they was until Lady Charlotte Sydenham interfered.”
The friend nodded her head rapidly to indicate intelligent appreciation.
“It isn’t like being reely brother and sister,” said Mrs. Pybus, contemplating possibilities. “It’s neither one thing nor another. And all wrop up in mystery as you might say. Why, oo knows? They might go falling in love with each other.”
“’Orrible!” said Mrs. Pybus’s friend.
“It ’ad to be put a stop to,” said Mrs. Pybus.
Confirmatory nodding, with a stern eye for the little figure that sat in a corner and pretended to be interested in the faded exploits of vanished royalties, recorded in that old volume of The Illustrated London News....
That conversation sank down into the deeps of Joan’s memory and remained there, obscured but exercising a dim influence upon her relations with Peter. One phrase sent up a bubble every now and then into her conscious thoughts: “half-sister.” It was years after that she began to piece together the hidden riddle of her birth. Mummy and Daddy were away; that had served as well for her as for Peter far beyond the Limpsfield days. It isn’t until children are in their teens that these things interest them keenly. It wasn’t a thing to talk about, she knew, but it was a thing to puzzle over. Who was really her father? Who was her mother? If she was Peter’s half-sister, then either his father was not hers or his mother....
When people are all manifestly in a plot to keep one in the dark one does not ask questions.
§ 9
After the first violent rupture that Mr. Grimes had organized, Joan and Peter parted and met again in a series of separations and resumptions. They went off to totally dissimilar atmospheres, Joan to the bracing and roughening air of Highmorton and Peter first to the brightness of White Court and then to the vigorous work and play of Caxton; and each time they returned for the holidays to Margate or Limpsfield or Pelham Ford changed, novel, and yet profoundly familiar. Always at first when holidays brought them together again they were shy with each other and intensely egotistical, anxious to show off their new tricks and make the most of whatever small triumphs school life had given them. Then in a day or so they would be at their ease together like a joint that has been dislocated and has slipped into place again. Cambridge at last brought them nearer together, and ended this series of dislocations. After much grave weighing of the situation by Miss Fairchild, the principal of Newton Hall, Peter, when Joan came up, was given the status of a full brother.