“When you came into the vestibule, didn’t you notice a little girl I was playing with—and a Chinese nurse——”
“Lord have mercy upon us!” exclaimed Clementina. “Do you hear that, Ephraim?”
“Yes, I hear,” said Quixtus tonelessly. The conflict within him between Mithra and Ahriman had left him weak and non-recipient of new impressions. “Hammersley has a little daughter. I wasn’t aware of it. I wonder how he got her. She must have a mother somewhere.”
“The mother’s dead,” said Poynter. “From what I could gather from Hammersley, the child has no kith or kin in the world. That was why he was so desperately anxious for you to come.”
Clementina peered at him with screwed-up monkey face, as if he were sitting for his portrait.
“It’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard in my life!” She clapped her hand to her pocket. “And this sealed envelope? Do you know anything about it?”
“I do,” said Poynter. “It contains a letter and a will. I wrote them both at his dictation ten days ago. The will is a properly attested document appointing Dr. Quixtus and yourself his executors and joint trustees of the little girl. A dear little girl,” he added, with a touch of wistfulness. “You’ll love her.”
“God grant it!” cried Clementina fervently. “But what an old maid like me and an old bachelor like him are going to do with a child between us, the Lord Almighty alone knows.”
Yet, as she spoke, the picture of the child—in spite of her preoccupation on entering the hotel, her sharp vision had noted the fairy fragility of the English scrap contrasting with the picturesque materialism of the fat Chinese nurse—the picture of the child enthroned on cushions (a feminine setting!) in the studio in Romney Place, flashed with acute distinctness before her mind, and some foolish thing within her leapt and stabbed her with a delicious pain.
Quixtus brushed his thinning hair from his forehead.