Barely comprehending his meaning, she faltered:
"Yet my grandmother——"
The Colonel broke in hastily:
"My mother was a Saint! What I have said does not apply to her!"
"And my mother?"
Something like a groan broke from the man. She felt him wince and shudder as she leaned upon him, saw the strong square teeth of the upper-jaw nip the ruddy lower lip, noted the ashen grayness that replaced the ebbed color, and the points of moisture that broke out upon his temples where his rich black hair was frosted with white. And looking, she bleached and shuddered in sympathy. His haunted eyes and haggard face bent over an upturned white mask, that had little of the grace of girlhood left in it. The distended pupils encroached upon the blue until her eyes seemed inky-black. He would have withdrawn the hand she held in both hers, but the soft little fingers turned to living steel, and he could not free himself. And the blue-black eyes staring out of the pinched elfin face quested in search of something that his own eyes strove to hide. As though his had been the weaker nature and hers the stronger (impossible, the creature being feminine), he felt his loathed secret being relentlessly drawn to light. The clear, unshaken question:
"Was not my mother good?" compelled him to truthful utterance. He heard a voice unlike his own replying:
"At the beginning—yes! I would stake my soul upon it. But during the war in the Crimea, when the Allies watered with the best blood of France and England that fatal soil, her loyalty to the absent husband weakened—her heart strayed!" He struck himself upon the breast passionately. "Yet here beat a heart that would have throbbed for love in death, had her lips kissed the shape of icy clay that housed it. It burns now with shame that I must strip off the veil of secrecy that until this moment has hidden from thee thy mother's sin!"
The head bent, a swift kiss touched his hand. Her mouth felt very cold. He went on, realizing that she demanded it:
"She fled with her lover upon the very day of the re-entry of the Army into Paris. After the triumph I hastened to Auteuil, where she and her child were living with my mother. That sainted soul met me at the door—the first glimpse of her face told the terrible intelligence. Had other lips than those beloved ones stabbed me with the truth, that night my revolver would have ended it!—I would not have lived to endure the pity in the faces of the friends who loved me—the curiosity in strangers' eyes."