Who was her mother? Clementina had no notion. Hammersley had never announced the fact of his marriage. The last time she had seen him was six years ago. The child gave herself out to be five and a half. Hammersley must have married just before leaving England. He had breathed not a word to anybody. But so had Will Hammersley acted all his life. He was one who gave and never sought; a man who received the confidence of all who knew him, and kept the secrets both of joy and sorrow of his own life hidden behind his smiling eyes.
One of the secrets—the dainty secret that lay in her arms—was out now; a fact in flesh and blood. And for the guidance of this sensitive wisp of humanity to womanhood she, Clementina, and Ephraim Quixtus were jointly responsible. It was a Puckish destiny that had brought their lives to this point of convergence. With the dead man lying cold and stark upstairs, the humour of it appeared too grim for smiles. She wished that the quiet, capable man of wise understanding and unselfish heart, who had missed the express train at Brindisi that would have sped him swiftly to his longed-for Devonshire, and had come on to Marseilles with the sick stranger, had been appointed her coadjutor. Poynter could have helped her mightily with his kindly wisdom and his knowledge of the hearts and the ways of men, as he was helping her that day in the performance of the dreary duties to the dead. But Quixtus! He was as much of a child as the one confided to his care. Anxious, however, that Sheila should be prepossessed in his favour, she drew a flattering picture of the new uncle that would shortly come into her life.
“Is he your husband?” asked Sheila.
“Good Lord, no!” cried Clementina, aghast at the grotesque suggestion. “Whatever put that in your head, child?”
It appeared that Dora Smith, one of her little friends in Shanghai, had an uncle and aunt who were married. She thought all uncles and aunts were married.
“Do you think he’ll like my frock?” asked Sheila.
The vanity of the feminine thing! Clementina laughed for the first time that dismal day.
“Do you think he’ll like mine?”
Sheila looked critically at the soiled, ill-fitting blouse, and the rusty old brown skirt, and reddened. She paused for a moment.
“I’m sure he’ll say that he does,” she replied sedately.