"I wonder whether this will be a boy.... But, boy or girl, it must be an awful thing to lie waiting for the birth of a child that you hate in advance, that's got to be hidden——"
He buried his face in his hands and sat without speaking.
"Is that what's happening?" I asked, for Sonia had never consulted me even in her most expansive moments.
He nodded abruptly.
"She doesn't want anyone to know that she's ill or why she's ill; no one else does, and we trust all of you. As soon as the child's born, it's going to be smuggled away.... It will be properly looked after, of course, and all that sort of thing, but it will never be allowed to know its own parents. All the arrangements have been made, and I gather that the doctor has been—most sympathetic and helpful." He smiled with scornful bitterness and sat for a minute without speaking. "I was surprised to find a woman like Violet touching the suggestion with the end of a pole; she was a bit surprised, too, I fancy, because she sort of excused herself and hoped Sonia would relent later on, but it was absolutely necessary to humour her in every way at present.... That kind of thing always sticks in the throat of a man—like a woman who refuses to have a family at all.... I don't know, I suppose I'm superstitious; I should feel that, if I brought a child into the world like that—furtively, shamefacedly, wrapping a blanket round it and carrying it out of the back door in the dead of night.... Wouldn't you, too, Stornaway? Wouldn't you feel that you were putting a curse on the poor little brute? And I can't imagine a woman deliberately doing that to another woman's child—let alone her own. Picture the child—later on-growing up.... Even if it never knows the manner of its birth, wouldn't you rather expect it to learn stealing in a Dickensian slum and to end up on the scaffold? I suppose it's all very fanciful and morbid.... But the other seems so infernally unnatural. I thought it wasn't done. I thought a mother would no more treat her own baby like that, whatever the provocation, than a man would hit a woman in the breast."
At O'Rane's age I might have thought the same thing.
"Doesn't anybody else know?" I asked.
"George may have told the Daintons; I didn't," he answered, smoothing the wrinkles out of his forehead. "We shall all have to rack our brains before the time comes, God knows. Violet says I must make a point of being in the house in case anything happens. If Sonia—dies, I mean, it would look funny my not being with her."
"And if other people have to be told?"