“You have children, Lady Harman!”
“I’ve four.”
He was really astonished, “Your own?”
She turned her fawn’s eyes on his with a sudden wonder at his meaning. “My own!” she said with the faintest tinge of astonished laughter in her voice. “What else could they be?”
“I thought——I thought you might have step-children.”
“Oh! of course! No! I’m their mother;—all four of them. They’re mine as far as that goes. Anyhow.”
And her eye questioned him again for his intentions.
But his thought ran along its own path. “You see,” he said, “there is something about you—so freshly beginning life. So like—Spring.”
“You thought I was too young! I’m nearly six-and-twenty! But all the same,—though they’re mine,—still——Why shouldn’t a woman have work in the world, Mr. Brumley? In spite of all that.”
“But surely—that’s the most beautiful work in the world that anyone could possibly have.”