“Tell him! He won’t need to be told, once she gets hold of him and gives him—what she told me.”
“What she told you?” Miss Pynsent repeated, open-eyed.
“The kiss her lips have been famished for, for years.”
“Ah, poor desolate woman!” the little dressmaker murmured, with her pity gushing up again. “Of course he’ll see she’s fond of him,” she pursued, simply. Then she added, with an inspiration more brilliant, “We might tell him she’s his aunt!”
“You may tell him she’s his grandmother, if you like. But it’s all in the family.”
“Yes, on that side,” said Miss Pynsent, musingly and irrepressibly. “And will she speak French?” she inquired. “In that case he won’t understand.”
“Oh, a child will understand its own mother, whatever she speaks,” Mrs Bowerbank returned, declining to administer a superficial comfort. But she subjoined, opening the door for escape from a prospect which bristled with dangers, “Of course, it’s just according to your own conscience. You needn’t bring the child at all, unless you like. There’s many a one that wouldn’t. There’s no compulsion.”
“And would nothing be done to me, if I didn’t?” poor Miss Pynsent asked, unable to rid herself of the impression that it was somehow the arm of the law that was stretched out to touch her.
“The only thing that could happen to you would be that he might throw it up against you later,” the lady from the prison observed, with a gloomy impartiality.
“Yes, indeed, if he were to know that I had kept him back.”