"Helen Dudleigh, John Angus's first wife; she whom Gilbert calls 'the little roseleaf.'"
"Helen Dudleigh!" Jeanne repeated in an indrawn voice. "Then Poppea can have no legal father, because John Angus's first wife merely left him and there was never a divorce. Perhaps this was the reason for her going, you know none was ever given; but no one ever dreamed that any fault lay with her."
"Yes, it was the reason of her going, yet no one need ever dream of legal wrong, for John Angus himself is Poppea's father."
Jeanne fell back, and then, after searching her husband's face and reading there that he was speaking the unmetaphorical truth, she drew a low chair to where she might continue to look at him and whispered:—
"Go on!"
"There is much detail among those papers that belongs to Poppea alone, but this is the brief story that I have drawn from them.
"Over thirty years ago, John Angus was travelling on the continent when, at the same hotel where he was stopping, he met an English artist, Walter Dudleigh, who was staying there, both on account of his health, and because his young daughter Helen was studying singing.
"Dudleigh was a widower of good birth but of frail health and uncertain means. That Angus was at once struck by the girl's delicate beauty—she was then only eighteen—some of these letters prove, and after hearing her sing at a fête of flowers given by the conservatory, in which she took the part of a poppy, he proposed to her, or rather to her father for her. The artist, knowing that he had only a short life before him and no one with whom to leave his child, urged on the match, and as a wedding gift to his son-in-law, painted a miniature of Helen as she had appeared at the fête with the poppies in her hair, having the fanciful name of Poppea engraved in the locket with the date.
"This is, of course, the miniature that hung about Poppea's neck when she was found.
"Dudleigh died of hemorrhage of the lungs almost before the honeymoon was over, leaving the girl an unexpected two thousand pounds that came from her mother, and Angus soon after returned to this country with his girl wife.