He drew up a chair to the fire, and she sat down.  He nodded at her encouragingly.  Presently she spoke.

“Well, at twenty-one I was studying hard, and he was painting—­”

“Blantyre?”

She inclined her head.  “He was full of dreams—­beautiful, I thought them; and he was ambitious.  Also he could talk quite marvellously.”

“Yes, Blantyre could talk—­once,” Byng intervened, gently.

“We were married secretly.”

Byng made a gesture of amazement, and his face became shocked and grave.  “Married!  Married!  You were married to Blantyre?”

“At a registry office in Chelsea.  One month, only one month it was, and then he went away to Madeira to paint—­’a big commission,’ he said; and he would send for me as soon as he could get money in hand—­certainly in a couple of months.  He had taken most of my half-year’s income—­I had been left four hundred a year by my mother.”

Byng muttered a malediction under his breath and leaned towards her sympathetically.

With an effort she continued.  “From Madeira he wrote to tell me he was going on to South Africa, and would not be home for a year.  From South Africa he wrote saying he was not coming back; that I could divorce him if I liked.  The proof, he said, would be easy; or I needn’t divorce him unless I liked, since no one knew we were married.”

For an instant there was absolute silence, and she sat with her fingers pressed tight to her eyes.  At last she went on, her face turned away from the great kindly blue eyes bent upon her, from the face flushed with honourable human sympathy.

“I went into the country, where I stayed for nearly three years, till—­till I could bear it no longer; and then I began to study and sing again.”

“What were you doing in the country?” he asked in a low voice.

“There was my baby,” she replied, her hands clasping and unclasping in pain.  “There was my little Nydia.”

“A child—­she is living?” he asked gently.

“No, she died two years ago,” was the answer in a voice which tried to be firm.

“Does Blantyre know?”

“He knew she was born, nothing more.”

“We were married secretly.”

“And after all he has done, and left undone, you want to try and save him now?”

He was thinking that she still loved the man.  “That offscouring!” he said to himself.  “Well, women beat all!  He treats her like a Patagonian; leaves her to drift with his child not yet born; rakes the hutches of the towns and the kraals of the veld for women—­always women, black or white, it didn’t matter; and yet, by gad, she wants him back!”

She seemed to understand what was passing in his mind.  Rising, with a bitter laugh which he long remembered, she looked at him for a moment in silence, then she spoke, her voice shaking with scorn: