"I have half forgotten what you told me about her in the first instance. I think you spoke of a mystery in her early life."
"The only mystery was that old Wornock should have married her, and that he should have told us nothing about her belongings. Had she been a lady, we must have heard something about her people in the last five and twenty years; and yet there is a refinement about her which makes me think she could not have sprung from the gutter."
"The gutter! No, indeed! She has an air of exceptional refinement. I should take her to be the offspring of an effete race—a crystallization. In her early married life, when she and Mr. Wornock were living together at Discombe, she had friends, I presume. They must have had visitors occasionally—a house-party?"
"Not they. You must remember that it was not more than six months after Mr. Wornock brought his young wife home when he took her away again——"
"But in the interim," interrupted Allan, eagerly, "they must have had visitors in the house! He would be proud to exhibit his pretty young wife. There must have been men-friends of his coming and going during that time."
"I think not. He was a dry chip; and I don't think he had made many friends in the forty years he had reigned at Discombe. I never heard of any one staying in the house, either at that time or previously. He was hospitable in a casual way to the neighbourhood while he was a bachelor—gave a hunt breakfast every winter, and a good many dinners—but he was not a man to make friends. He was an ardent politician and an ardent Radical, and would have quarrelled with any one who wasn't of his way of thinking."
A blank here. No hint of a too-frequent visitor, of one figure standing out against the quiet background of home-life, of one person whose coming and going had been marked enough to attract attention.
Allan breathed more freely. It was no prurient curiosity which had led him to pry into the secrets of the past. He wanted to know the truth; yet it would have been agony to him to discover anything that would lessen his reverent admiration for his father, or his belief in his father's honour and high principle. Sitting idle in the sunshine beside Mrs. Mornington, he tried to think that there might be nothing more than eccentricity in Mrs. Wornock's conduct, no indication of a dark secret in her fainting-fit, or in her embarrassed manner during his mother's visit.
Mrs. Mornington went back to the subject of her dance—her niece, her brother, his income, his establishment, and the how much or how little he could afford to spend. She lamented the dearth of dancing men.
"Both my boys are away," she said, "Luke with his regiment in Burmah, Fred in London. He might run down for the evening if he liked; but you know what young men are. Well, perhaps you are more civilized than Frederick. He pretends to hate dancing-parties; yet, when we spent a winter at Cannes, he was at a ball nearly every night. He despises my poor little dance."