"Only Mummy—my stepmother." She smiled through her tears. "Papa would never let Ally go to her."
"Why not?"
"Because she ran away from him."
He tried not to laugh.
"She's really quite decent, though you mightn't think it." Rowcliffe smiled. "And she's fond of Ally. She's fond of all of us—except Papa. And," she added, "she knows a lot of people."
He smiled again. He pictured the third Mrs. Cartaret as a woman of affectionate gaiety and a pleasing worldliness, so well surrounded by adorers of his own sex that she could probably furnish forth her three stepdaughters from the numbers of those she had no use for. He was more than ever disgusted with the Vicar who had driven from him a woman so admirably fitted to play a mother's part.
"She sounds," he said, "as if she'd be the very one."
"She would be. It's an awful pity."
"Well," he said, "we won't talk any more about it now. We'll think of something. We simply must get her away."
He was thinking that he knew of somebody—a doctor's widow—who also would be fitted. If they could afford to pay her. And if they couldn't, he would very soon have the right——