“With some women this might have passed with a measure of regret, and some possible contempt for his silence, but not so with her.  She rose to her feet—­I can see her yet—­and for a moment stood facing him in the still, overpowering manner of one who feels the icy pang of hate enter where love has been.  Never was moment more charged.  I could not breathe while it lasted; and when at last she spoke, it was with an impetuosity of concentrated passion, hardly less dreadful than her silence had been.

“‘You a father!  A father already!’ she cried, all her sweetness swallowed up in ungovernable wrath.  ’You whom I expected to make so happy with a child?  I curse you and your brat.  I—­’

“He strove to placate her, to explain.  But rage has no ears, and before I realized my own position, the scene became openly tempestuous.  That her child should be second to another woman’s seemed to awaken demon instincts within her.  When he ventured to hint that his little girl needed a mother’s care, her irony bit like corroding acid.  He became speechless before it and had not a protest to raise when she declared that the secret he had kept so long and so successfully he must continue to keep to his dying day.  That the child he had failed to own in his first wife’s lifetime should remain disowned in hers, and if possible be forgotten.  She should never give the girl a thought nor acknowledge her in any way.

“She was Fury embodied; but the fury was of that grand order which allures rather than repels.  As I felt myself succumbing to its fascination and beheld how he was weakening under it even more perceptibly than myself, I started from my chair, and sought to glide away before I should hear him utter a fatal acquiescence.

“But the movement I made unfortunately drew their attention to me, and after an instant of silent contemplation of my distracted countenance, Frank said, as though he were the elder by the forty years which separated us: 

“’You have listened to Mrs. Postlethwaite’s wishes.  You will respect them of course.’”

That was all.  He knew and she knew that I was to be trusted; but neither of them has ever known why.

A month later her child came, and was welcomed as though it were the first to bear his name.  It was a boy, and their satisfaction was so great that I looked to see their old affection revive.  But it had been cleft at the root, and nothing could restore it to life.  They loved the child; I have never seen evidence of greater parental passion than they both displayed, but there their feelings stopped.  Towards each other they were cold.  They did not even unite in worship of their treasure.  They gloated over him and planned for him, but always apart.  He was a child in a thousand, and as he developed, the mother especially, nursed all her energies for the purpose of ensuring for him a future commensurate with his talents.  Never a very conscientious woman, and alive to the advantages of wealth as demonstrated by the power wielded by her rich brother-in-law, she associated all the boy’s prospects with money, great money, such money as Andrew had accumulated, and now had at his disposal for his natural heirs.