“But forgive me, you must have some relations in England?”
“Only one of whom I know,” she replied. “My father’s brother. My father had quarrelled with him—bitterly, I fear; but when he was dying he bade me write to my uncle and tell him how we were placed. I did so. No answer came. Then after my father’s death I wrote again. I told my uncle that I was alone, that I was without money, that in a short time I should be homeless, that if I could return to England I could live by teaching French. He did not reply. I could do no more.”
“That was outrageous,” he answered, flushing darkly. Though well under thirty he was a tall man and portly, with one of those large faces that easily become injected. “Do you know—is your uncle also in narrow circumstances?”
“I know no more than his name,” she said. “My father never spoke of him. They had quarrelled. Indeed, my father spoke little of his past.”
“But when you did not hear from your uncle, did you not tell your father?”
“It could do no good,” she said. “And he was dying.”
He was not sentimental, this big man, whose entrance into a room carried with it a sense of power. Nor was he one to be lightly moved, but her simplicity and the picture her words drew for him of the daughter and the dying man touched him. Already his mind was made up that the Czartoriski should not turn her adrift for lack of a word. Aloud, “The Princess did not tell me your name,” he said. “May I know it?”
“Audley,” she said. “Mary Audley.”
He stared at her. She supposed that he had not caught the name. She repeated it.
“Audley? Do you really mean that?”