“Yes; he was a scoundrel.  He was bad all along.  I think he has no heart.  And he has made me bad too.  I was a good enough girl of old, before I knew him.  Only something came over me to-night when I found her there, with that big house and the servants, and all that luxury, and thought how he couldn’t spare a few pounds to bring his own child up decent.  Oh, I was vile to-night.  I frightened her.  Perhaps it was best as it happened.  It dazed her.  She’ll remember less.  She’ll only remember your part of it, sir.”

She glanced across at him with timid eyes, which asked him to be so good as to explain:  all that had confused her so.

“I don’t understand,” she murmured helplessly—­“I don’t understand.”

He ignored the interrogation in her eyes with a little gesture, half irritable and half entreating, which coerced her.

“How did you come there?” he asked.  “What was the good——­”

His question languished suddenly, and he let both hands fall slowly upon his knees.  In effect, the uselessness of all argument, the futility of any recrimination in the face of what had been accomplished, was suddenly borne in upon him with irresistible force:  and his momentary irritation against the malice of circumstance, the baseness of the man, was swallowed up in a rising lassitude which simply gave up.

The girl continued after a while, in a low, rapid voice, her eyes fixed intently upon the opal in an antique ring which shone faintly upon one of Rainham’s quiet hands, as though its steady radiance helped her speech: 

“It was all an accident—­an accident.  I was sick and tired of waiting and writing, and getting never a word in reply.  My health went too, last winter, and ever since I have been getting weaker and worse.  I knew what that meant:  my mother died of a decline—­yes, she is dead, thank God! this ten years—­and it was then, when I knew I wouldn’t get any better, and there was the child to think of, that I wanted to see him once more.  There was a gentleman, too, who came——­”

She broke off for a moment, clasping her thin hands together, which trembled as though the memory of some past, fantastic terror had recurred.

“It doesn’t matter,” she went on presently.  “He frightened me, that was all.  He had such a stern, smooth-spoken way with him; and he seemed to know so much.  He said that he had heard of me and my story, and would befriend me if I would tell him the name of the man who ruined me.  Yes, he would befriend me, help me to lead a respectable life.”

Her sunken eyes flashed for a moment, and her lip was scornfully curled.

“God knows!” she cried, with a certain rude dignity, “I was always an honest woman but for Cyril—­Dick she called him.”

The intimate term, tossed so lightly from those lips, caused Rainham to quiver, as though she had rasped raw wounds.  It was the concrete touch giving flesh and blood to his vision of her past.  It made the girl’s old relation with Eve’s husband grow into a very present horror, startlingly real and distinct.