Her eyes were inscrutable, and her lips were folded close.
"She was the wife of the Colonel commanding my old Regiment—Sir George Hawting. A grand old warrior, and something of a martinet. He married a third daughter of the Duke of Runcorn—Lady Lucy Briddwater."
She said without the betraying flicker of an eyelash: "I have seen the lady named...."
He said, with a prick of self-reproach for having again turned the barb that festered in her bosom:
"Lady Lucy was a very lovely creature, and a very impulsive one. She lived not happily, and she died tragically."
There was the ring of steel and the coldness of ice in the Mother's words:
"She met the fate she chose."
He thought, looking at her:
"What a woman this is! How silent, how resourceful, how calm, how immeasurably deep! And why does she think of me as an opponent?" He went on, stung by that quiet marshalling of all her forces against him:
"Unhappily, the fate we choose for ourselves sometimes involves others. The death of that unhappy woman and the father of her child left an innocent creature at the mercy of sordid, evil hands."