“He is going to be married, I hear.”
“He is married. He was married last summer.”
“Do you know his wife?”
“Yes.”
“Is she beautiful?”
“Not so beautiful as you; but she has a complexion like the inside of a sea-shell. You know those pale shells, almost transparent, with a rosy flush that is less a colour than a light. She has pale gold hair, which shines round her low, broad forehead like a nimbus in one of Fra Angelica’s pictures of Virgins and angels. She is rather like an old Italian picture, of that early school which chose a golden-haired ideal and left your glowing Southern beauty out in the cold. She is not so handsome as you, bellissima.”
“Yet he liked her better than he liked me. What is the good of my being handsome? He did not care,” said Lisa, passionately.
It was the first time she had betrayed herself to Sefton. He smiled, and glanced from the mother’s angry face to the boy, who was hanging about her knee, unconsciously reproducing the attitude of many an infant St. John.
“Yes, there can be no doubt,” he told himself, “Vansittart is the man she loved, and this brat must be Vansittart’s offspring.”
Lady Hartley had told him that her brother had been a rambler in Italy and the Tyrol for years before her marriage.