“I was very ill—so ill that they thought I should not live. But I did live, and I brought my baby into the world. Only, he was born with that white lock of hair. And my own hair had turned perfectly white.”
Jean was silent for a little. At last she said softly:
“I’m so glad, madonna, that you were happy afterwards. Your ‘house of dreams’ came true in the end!”
“Yes”—Lady Anne’s grey eyes were very bright and luminous. “My house of dreams came true.”
After a while, she went on quietly:
“But my poor Blaise’s house of dreams fell in ruins. The foundation was rotten. You knew, didn’t you, that there was a woman he once cared for?”
Jean nodded. Speech was difficult to her just at that moment.
“It was a miserable business altogether. The girl, Nesta Freyne was an Italian. Blaise met her when he was travelling in Italy, and—oh, well, it wasn’t love! Not love as I know it, and as I think, one day, you too will know it. It blazed up, just one of those wild infatuations that sometimes spring into being between a man and a woman, and almost before he had time to think, Blaise had married her——”
“Married her!”
The words leapt from Jean’s lips before she could check them. In the account of Tormarin’s disastrous love affair which had been forced upon her hearing in London, there had been no mention of the word marriage, and she had always imagined that the woman, this Nesta Freyne, had simply jilted him in favour of another man. Moreover, since she had been at Staple, nothing had been said to correct this impression, as, very naturally, the subject was one avoided by general consent.