“Yes. She was not Elizabeth.”
His cousin turned to him, indignation blazing in his eyes. “For twenty years, Peter, you believed you knew your wife’s whereabouts, you knew she was in more or less a state of poverty, and you made no attempt to see her face to face? You accepted the story of another with no attempt to personally prove the truth yourself?”
“I had good reason to believe it,” returned Peter sulkily. “She would have let me know if she were in want. I had told her she could come back when she had had enough of it.”
“And this poor woman, whose son was killed. What of her?”
“I don’t know anything about her except she wasn’t Elizabeth.”
“You had believed her so for twenty years.”
“I had made a mistake. She knew nothing about that. I took good care she should not. There was no doubt about her being the boy’s mother, and no doubt she was not Elizabeth. She had no claim on me.”
“No claim!” Charles Aston stood up and faced him, “not even the claim of the widow—her one son dead. No claim, when for all those years those two items of humanity represented in your perverse mind the two people nearest—I won’t say dearest—to you. 214 No claim!” He stopped and walked away to the window.
Peter smiled tolerantly. He enjoyed making this kind, generous man flash out with indignation. It was all very high-flown and impossible, but it suited Charles Aston. To-day, however, he was too engrossed in his own affairs to get much satisfaction from it.
“Well, well, don’t let us argue about it. We don’t think alike in these matters. The point I want to consult you about is not my susceptibility to sentiment, but the chances of my picking up a clue twenty years old.”