She looked round the room, with its contents.

“It did matter to me,” he said stubbornly.  “My collections are the only satisfaction left to me—­by you, Lady Tatham—­and others.  They are to me in the place of children.  I love my bronzes—­and my marbles—­as you—­I suppose—­love your son.  It sounds incredible to you, no doubt”—­the sneer was audible—­“but it is so.”

“Even if it were so—­it is twenty years ago.  You have replaced what you lost a hundred times.”

“I have never replaced it.  And it is now out of my reach—­in the Berlin Museum—­bought by that fellow Jensen, their head man, who goes nosing like a hound all over Europe—­and is always poaching in my preserves.”

Victoria looked at him in puzzled amazement.  Was this mad, this childish bitterness, a pose?—­or was there really some breakdown of the once powerful brain?  She began again—­less confidently.

“I have told you—­I repeat—­how sorry she is—­how fully she admits she was wrong.  But just consider how she has paid for it!  Your allowance to her—­you must let me speak plainly—­could not keep her and her child decently.  Her family have been unfortunate; she has had to keep them as well as herself.  And the end of it is that she—­and your child—­your own child—­have come pretty near to starvation.”

He sat immovable.  But Victoria rose to her task.  Her veil thrown back from the pale austerity of her beauty, she poured out the story of Netta and Felicia, from a heart sincerely touched.  The sordid years in Florence, the death of Netta’s mother, the bankruptcy of her father, the bitter struggle amid the Apuan Alps to keep themselves and their wretched invalid alive—­she described them, as they had been told to her, not rhetorically, for neither she nor Netta Melrose was capable of rhetoric, but with the touches and plain details that bring conviction.

“They have been hungry—­for the peasants’ food.  Your wife and child have had to be content day after day with a handful of bread and a salata gathered from the roadside; while every franc they could earn was spent upon a sick man.  Mrs. Melrose is a shadow.  I suspect incurable illness.  Your little daughter arrived fainting and emaciated at my house.  But with a few days’ rest and proper food she has revived.  She is young.  She has not suffered irreparably.  One sees what a lovely little creature she might be—­and how full of vivacity and charm.  Mr. Melrose—­you would be proud of her!  She is like you—­like what you were, in your youth.  When I think of what other people would give for such a daughter!  Can you possibly deny yourself the pleasure of taking her back into your life?”

“Very easily!  Your sentimentalism will resent it; I assure you, nevertheless, that it would give me no pleasure whatever.”