She cast furtive glances at him from time to time as he sat back, obscure in his corner, gazing out with eyes which saw nothing at the blurred gas-lamps, and the red flashes of the more rapid vehicles which outstripped them.  And now that the first stupefying effect of his intervention was wearing away—­it seemed like a mad scene in a theatre, or some monstrous dream, so surprising and unreal—­her primitive consciousness awoke, and set her wondering, inquiring, with bewilderment that was akin to terror, into the motives and bearing of their joint conduct.  It had seemed to her natural enough then, as do the most grotesque of our sleeping visions when they are passing; but now that she was awake, relieved from the coercion of his eyes, she was roundly amazed at her own complicity in so stupendous a fiction.  What had he made her do?  Why had he taken this sin of another’s on his own shoulders?  Eve’s piteous cry of “Philip!” at his entry recurred to her—­the intimate nature of her appeal.  The scent was promising; but it opened out vistas of a loyalty too fantastic and generous to be true.  Her mature cynicism of a girl of the people, disillusioned and abused, flouted the idea.  Did she not know “gentlemen” and the nature of their love?  The girl was hardened by ill-usage, bitter from long brooding over her shame.  She was glad when he turned to her at last, breaking a silence which the sullen roar of London outside and beyond them, the dreary rattling of the cab, seemed only to heighten, with a sudden gesture of despair.

“If I had only known!  If you had only told me two years ago!”

The suppressed passion in his voice, his air, terrified the girl.  She bent forward trembling.

“Ah! what have I done, what have I done?” she moaned.  “How did I know that it would all come like this?  I meant no harm, sir.  He persuaded me to deceive you after I had found out who he really was, to put you off the scent, keeping his name a secret.  He said he had a right to ask that.  He told me he was married, though he wasn’t then.  And afterwards he made me move, when you were abroad:  he wanted my address not to be known.  That was the condition he made of his seeing after the child; he swore he would provide for her then, and bring her up like a lady.  And he sent me the money for a bit pretty regular.  Oh, it was only for her sake, I promise you that!  I wouldn’t have touched a brass farthing for myself.  But, after all, she was his child.  And then, somehow or other, the money didn’t come.  He went away—­he was away all the summer—­and he said he had so many calls on him, such expenses.”

“Ah, the scoundrel!” cried Rainham, between his set teeth.

The girl took him up, hardly with an echo of his own resentment, rather with a sort of crushed directness, as one who acknowledged a bare fact, making no comment, merely admitting the obscure dreariness of things.