Lord Grosville assented.
It appeared that during the last year of his life Lady Alice had nursed her husband faithfully through disease and poverty; for scarcely a vestige of her fortune remained, and an application for money made by Wensleydale to Madame d'Estrées, unknown to his wife, had been peremptorily refused. The colonel died, and within three months of his death Lady Alice had also lost her son and only child, of blood-poisoning developed in Naples, whither he had been summoned from school that his father might see him for the last time.
Then, after seventeen years, Lady Alice came back to her kindred, who had last seen her as a young girl—gentle, undeveloped, easily led, and rather stupid. She returned a gray-haired woman of thirty-four, who had lost youth, fortune, child, and husband; whose aspect, moreover, suggested losses still deeper and more drear. At first she wrapped herself in what seemed to some a dull and to others a tragic silence. But suddenly a flame leaped up in her. She became aware of the position of Madame d'Estrées in London; and one day, at a private view of the Academy, her former step-mother went up to her smiling, with out-stretched hand. Lady Alice turned very pale; the hand dropped, and Alice Wensleydale walked rapidly away. But that night, in the Grosville house, she spoke out.
"She told Lina and myself the whole story. You'd have thought the woman was possessed. My wife—she's not of the crying sort, nor am I. But she cried, and I believe—well, I can tell you it was enough to move a stone. And when she'd done, she just went away, and locked her door, and let no one say a word to her. She has told one or two other relations and friends, and—"
"And the relations and friends have told others?"
"Well, I can answer for myself," said Grosville after a pause. "This happened three months ago. I never have told, and never shall tell, all the details as she told them to us. But we have let enough be known—"
"Enough?—enough to damn Madame d'Estrées?"
"Oh, well, as far as the women were concerned, she was mostly that already. There are other tales going about. I expect you know them."
"No, I don't know them," said Ashe.
Lord Grosville's face expressed surprise. "Well, this finished it," he said.