“And this man knows”—­she said, with a shudder.

“He knows Steptoe and the boy, but he don’t know Horncastle nor you.  Don’t you be skeert.  He’s the last man in the world who would hanker to see me or the kid again, or would dare to say that he ever had!  Lord!  I’d like to see his fastidious mug if me and Eddy walked in upon him and his high-toned mother and sister some arternoon.”  He threw himself back and laughed a derisive, spasmodic, choking laugh, which was so far from being genial that it even seemed to indicate a lively appreciation of pain in others rather than of pleasure in himself.  He had often laughed at her in the same way.

“And where is he now?” she said, with a compressed lip.

“At school.  Where, I don’t tell you.  You know why.  But he’s looked after by me, and d——­d well looked after, too.”

She hesitated, composed her face with an effort, parted her lips, and looked out of the window into the gathering darkness.  Then after a moment she said slowly, yet with a certain precision:—­

“And his mother?  Do you ever talk to him of her?  Does—­does he ever speak of me?”

“What do you think?” he said comfortably, changing his position in the chair, and trying to read her face in the shadow.  “Come, now.  You don’t know, eh?  Well—­no!  No!  You understand.  No!  He’s my friend—­mine!  He’s stood by me through thick and thin.  Run at my heels when everybody else fled me.  Dodged vigilance committees with me, laid out in the brush with me with his hand in mine when the sheriff’s deputies were huntin’ me; shut his jaw close when, if he squealed, he’d have been called another victim of the brute Horncastle, and been as petted and canoodled as you.”

It would have been difficult for any one but the woman who knew the man before her to have separated his brutish delight in paining her from another feeling she had never dreamt him capable of,—­an intense and fierce pride in his affection for his child.  And it was the more hopeless to her that it was not the mere sentiment of reciprocation, but the material instinct of paternity in its most animal form.  And it seemed horrible to her that the only outcome of what had been her own wild, youthful passion for this brute was this love for the flesh of her flesh, for she was more and more conscious as he spoke that her yearning for the boy was the yearning of an equally dumb and unreasoning maternity.  They had met again as animals—­in fear, contempt, and anger of each other; but the animal had triumphed in both.

When she spoke again it was as the woman of the world,—­the woman who had laughed two years ago at the irrepressible Barker.  “It’s a new thing,” she said, languidly turning her rings on her fingers, “to see you in the role of a doting father.  And may I ask how long you have had this amiable weakness, and how long it is to last?”