Mrs. Stoddart certainly listened. She had been ready to do so for a long time.
And Annette told her of her childhood spent in London under the charge of her three spinster aunts. Her mother, an Englishwoman, had been the only good-looking one of four sisters. In the thirties, after some disappointment, she had made a calamitous run-away marriage with a French courier.
"I always thought I could understand mother running away from that home," said Annette. "I would have run away too, if I could. I did once as a small child, but I only got as far as Bethnal Green."
"Then your mother died when you were quite small?"
"Yes; I can just remember being with her in lodgings after she left father—for she had to leave him. But he got all her money from her first—at least, all she had it in her power to give up. I can remember how she used to sob at night when she thought I was asleep. And then, my next remembrance is the aunts and the house in London. They meant to be kind. They were kind. I was their niece, after all. But they were Nevills. It seems it is a very noble, mysterious thing to be a Nevill. Now, I was only half a Nevill, and only half English, and dark like father. I take after father. And of course I am not quite a lady. They felt that."
"You look like one," said Mrs. Stoddart.
"Do I? I think that is only because I hold myself well and know how to put on my clothes."
"My dear Annette! As if those two facts could deceive me for a moment!"
"But I am not one, all the same," said Annette. "Gentle-people, I don't mean only the aunts but—others, don't regard me as their equal, or—or treat me so."
She was silent for a moment, and her lip quivered. Then she went on quietly—