Mrs. Pendleton supposed Sisily was fretting over her mother, but she did not understand a girl whose grief took the form of silence and stillness.  She would have preferred a niece who would have sobbed out her grief on her shoulder, been reasonably comforted, and eaten a good dinner afterwards.  But Sisily was not that kind of girl.  She was strange and unapproachable.  There was something almost repellent in her reserve, something in her dark preoccupied gaze which made Mrs. Pendleton feel quite nervous, and unfeignedly relieved when Sisily had asked to be allowed to go to her room immediately the meal was concluded.

As she sat at the table, reviewing the events of the afternoon, after the girl had taken her departure, Mrs. Pendleton regretted that she had consented to take charge of Sisily.  She flattered herself that she was sufficiently modern not to care a row of pins for the stigma on the girl’s birth, but there were awkward circumstances, and not the least of them was her own rash promise to break the news to Sisily that she was illegitimate.  That disclosure was not likely to help their future relations together.  Mrs. Pendleton reflected that she knew very little about her niece, whom she had not seen since she was a small girl, but the recollection of her set face and tragic eyes at the dinner table impelled prompt recognition of the fact that she was going to be difficult to manage.

But there was more than that.  With a feeling of dismay Mrs. Pendleton’s mind awoke to a belated realization of the scandal which would fasten on Sisily and her birth if Robert succeeded in establishing his claim to the title.  A peer of the realm with an illegitimate, disinherited daughter!  The story would be pounced upon by a sensational press, avid for precisely such topics.  In imagination Mrs. Pendleton saw the flaming headlines, the photographs, and the highly spiced reports in which every detail of her brother’s private life was laid bare for a million curious eyes.

Such an exposure was too terrible to be faced.  Mrs. Pendleton saw her own comfortable life affected by it; saw her position in her small social circle shaken and overwhelmed by the clamour of notoriety.  She saw herself the focus of the malicious tea-table gossip of all her friends.  Decidedly, it would not do.

She did her brother the justice to realize that he had overlooked the public effect of the disclosure of his painful domestic secret as completely as she had.  He had forgotten that his accession to the peerage would make him, as it were, a public figure, and the glamour which the newspapers would throw over his lifelong quest would invest every act of his life with a publicity from which he could not hope to escape.  If he had foreseen this, he would have made some other arrangement for his daughter’s future, not for the girl’s sake, but for the honour of the famous old name of which he was so fanatically proud.