"Shame you?" she echoed. "I? What shame have I brought you? What shame shall I bring? Had you owned me as your child I would have made you proud of me! I would have given you honour,—you abandoned me to strangers, and I have made honour for myself! Shame is YOURS and yours only!—it would be mine if I had to acknowledge YOU as my mother!—you who never had the courage to be true!" Her young voice thrilled with passion.—"I have won my own way! I am something beyond and above you!—'your own class—your own people,' as you call them, are at MY feet,—and you—you who played with my father's heart and spoilt his career—you have lived to know that I, his deserted child, have made his name famous!"
Lady Blythe stared at her like some enraged cat ready to spring.
"His name—his name!" she muttered, fiercely. "Yes, and how dare you take it? You have no right to it in law!"
"Wise law, just law!" said the girl, passionately. "Would you rather I had taken yours? I might have done so had I known it—though I think not, as I should have been ashamed of any 'maiden' name you had dishonoured! When you came to Briar Farm to find me—to see me—so late, so late!—after long years of desertion—I told you it was possible to make a name;—one cannot go nameless through the world! I have made mine!—independently and honestly—in fact"—and she smiled, a sad cold smile—"it is an honour for you, my mother, to know me, your daughter!"
Lady Blythe's face grew ghastly pale in the uncertain light of the half-veiled moon. She moved a step and caught the girl's arm with some violence.
"What do you mean to do?" she asked, in an angry whisper, "I must know! What are your plans of vengeance?—your campaign of notoriety?—your scheme of self-advertisement? What claim will you make?"
"None!" and Innocent looked at her fully, with calm and fearless dignity. "I have no claim upon you, thank God! I am less to you than a dropped lamb, lost in a thicket of thorns, is to the sheep that bore it! That's a rough country simile,—I was brought up on a farm, you know!—but it will serve your case. Think nothing of me, as I think nothing of you! What I am, or what I may be to the world, is my own affair!"
There was a pause. Presently Lady Blythe gave a kind of shrill hysterical laugh.
"Then, when we meet in society, as we have met to-night, it will be as comparative strangers?"
"Why, of course!—we have always been strangers," the girl replied, quietly. "No strangers were ever more strange to each other than we!"