“Don’t dearest me. I am almost out of my mind—indeed, I should not be surprised if I were to have brain fever, or something. When I remember how I have lowered myself—letting him see that I cared for him; for I have no doubt he did see, and that was why he made me his confidante this afternoon, and told me about that creature—a woman with a nameless son. Do you think I can ever get over the degradation of being talked to about such a subject?”
Eve did not answer. She sank down upon the sofa, while her sister stood before the looking-glass, frowning at her tear-stained face as she unbuttoned the bodice of her gown, that gown which she made a point of calling her “frock.”
Her nameless son. Eve remembered the boy in the boat, the Murillo-faced boy, looking up with big wondering eyes as his mother and Vansittart clasped hands. Her nameless son. She remembered that curious speech of Vansittart’s a week ago—“Yes, it was at Venice we met. That is the first half of the riddle.” What was the second half? The parentage of that boy, perhaps. His son—his son—another woman’s and his. And she, his adoring wife, had no son to place in his arms, no child to gratify the well-born man’s desire to see his race prolonged.
“If I live to be an old woman he may die without an heir,” she thought. “There may be no more Vansittarts of Merewood. Hannah’s husband did not hate her because she was childless—but then he had other wives.”
She pictured her husband loving that alien’s son, making him his heir perhaps by-and-by, desiring to bring him into his home, asking her to receive Hagar’s child, to let him call her mother. She had heard of such things being done.
“No, no, no, not for worlds,” she protested to herself. “I could not do it.”
She got up and walked about the room, while Sophy bathed her eyes, and tried to undo the damages her emotions had inflicted on her delicate prettiness.
“I can’t go to the party looking like this,” exclaimed Sophy, ruefully contemplating her swollen eyelids in the glass.
“We need not go till half-past ten. Eleven o’clock would be early enough. There is time for you to get back your good looks. Benson shall bring you a light little dinner, and then you had better lie down and take a long nap.”
“Do you think I can eat or sleep in my state of mind?” protested Sophy; but a quarter of an hour later, when Benson appeared with an appetizing meal, the victim of misplaced affection found that violent emotions are not incompatible with hunger.