"Miss Mildare?"
"Why, yes, that is her name.... An orphan, I have heard, and with no living relatives. But she seems happy enough at the Convent, judging by what Mrs. Greening says."
The hearer experienced a momentary feeling of relief and of anger—relief to think that dead Dick Mildare's daughter should have found refuge in such a woman's heart; anger that the woman should have concealed from him the girl's identity, knowing her the object of his own anxious search.
Then he understood. His anger died as suddenly as it had been kindled. He recalled something that he had seen when the rearing horse had inclined perilously towards the footway—that protecting maternal gesture, that swift interposition of the tall, active, black-robed figure between the white-clad, flower-faced, girlish creature and those threatening iron-shod hoofs....
"She loves the girl—Dick Mildare's daughter by the treacherous friend who stole him from her. Is there a doubt? With poor little Lady Lucy Hawting's willowy figure and the same nymph-like droop of the little head, with its rich twists and coils of dead-leaf-coloured hair, shaded by the big black hat. That woman has taken her to her heart, however she came by her; the parting would be agony, stern, proud, tender creature that she is! I suppose she will be doing thundering penance for not having told me, a fellow who simply walked into the place and assegaied her with my death-news. Here's a marrowy bone of gossip Lady Hannah shall never crack. And yet I wouldn't swear there's not an angel husked inside that dried-up little chrysalis. For God made all women, though He only turned out a few of 'em perfect, and some only just a little better than the ruck."
He roused himself from the brown study that brought into relief many lurking lines and furrows in the thin, keen face, as the Chief Medical Officer, fixing him through suspicious eyeglasses, demanded:
"Ye got your full allowance o' sleep last nicht?"
He nodded.
"Thanks to a Cockney babe in bandoliers, who was born not only with eyes and ears, like other infants, but with the capacity for using 'em."
"Ay. It's remarr'kable how many men will daudle complacently through life, from the cradle to the grave, wi'out the remotest consciousness that they're practically blind and no better than deaf, as far as regards real seeing and hearing. But who's your prodeegy?"