"Of course! You see the delicacy of their position. After playing into the hands of Lady Louisa for nearly a quarter of a century, they suddenly find the whole situation changed by the baronet's belated discovery that he once had a sister."
"You have not told me all this without a purpose. Do you want my advice?"
Philip's face was clouded, his eyes downcast.
"You understand," he said, after a long pause, "that some one, either the man or the woman—the woman, I think—is morally responsible for my mother's death. She was poor—wretchedly, horribly poor—the poverty of thin clothing and insufficient food. She was ill, confined to a miserable hovel for weary months, and was so utterly unprovided with the barest necessaries that the parish doctor was on the point of compelling her to go to the workhouse infirmary when death came. Am I to be the instrument of God's vengeance on this woman?"
Mr. Abingdon, who had risen to light a cigar, placed a kindly hand on the young man's shoulder.
"Philip," he said, with some emotion, "I have never yet heard you utter a hasty judgment. You have prudence far beyond your years. It seems to me, speaking with all the reverence of man in face of the decrees of Providence, that God has already provided a terrible punishment for Lady Louisa Morland. What is the name of her son?"
"I do not know. I forgot to ask."
"I have a wide experience of the jeunesse dorée of London. Hardly a week passed during many years of my life that one of his type did not appear before me in the dock. What is he—a roué, a gambler, probably a drunkard?"
"All these, I gathered from the solicitors."
"And if your mother were living, what would she say to Lady Morland?"