“You are in no degree culpable, Mrs. Clayton, for the mistakes and misdeeds of your husband. What more can you tell me?”
“Two years after the birth of my children, Mr. Carter, my husband disappeared, taking with him one of my sons,” she replied. “I never saw Gideon Margate again.”
“Nor the child?”
“The child was named David. I will not undertake to tell you what I suffered from losing him, from my inability to trace him, and from my terrible fear of the life to which he would be bred.”
“That of a criminal?”
“Yes.”
“And your fears came true?”
“Terribly so.”
“Tell me the bare facts?”
“I took my maiden name, Julia Clayton, about a year after my husband disappeared,” she continued. “I suspected that he was in America, and in the hope of recovering my other son, we came here, and since have lived here. I have been in England only once since then, and that was twelve years ago. I then saw in a London newspaper the picture of a criminal who had just been sent to prison for five years for burglary.”