“So far as I know,” Babbie answered hardly, “they did not come back.  I have never seen them since.  I think they were drunk.  My only recollection of my mother is that she once took me to see the dead body of some gypsy who had been murdered.  She told me to dip my hand in the blood, so that I could say I had done so when I became a woman.  It was meant as a treat to me, and is the one kindness I am sure I got from her.  Curiously enough, I felt the shame of her deserting me for many years afterwards.  As a child I cried hysterically at thought of it; it pained me when I was at school in Edinburgh every time I saw the other girls writing home; I cannot think of it without a shudder even now.  It is what makes me worse than other women.”

Her voice had altered, and she was speaking passionately.

“Sometimes,” she continued, more gently, “I try to think that my mother did come back for me, and then went away because she heard I was in better hands than hers.  It was Lord Rintoul who found me, and I owe everything to him.  You will say that he has no need to be proud of me.  He took me home on his horse, and paid his gardener’s wife to rear me.  She was Scotch, and that is why I can speak two languages.  It was he, too, who sent me to school in Edinburgh.”

“He has been very kind to you,” said Gavin, who would have preferred to dislike the earl.

“So kind,” answered Babbie, “that now he is to marry me.  But do you know why he has done all this?”

Now again she was agitated, and spoke indignantly.

“It is all because I have a pretty face,” she said, her bosom rising and falling.  “Men think of nothing else.  He had no pity for the deserted child.  I knew that while I was yet on his horse.  When he came to the gardener’s afterwards, it was not to give me some one to love, it was only to look upon what was called my beauty; I was merely a picture to him, and even the gardener’s children knew it and sought to terrify me by saying, ’You are losing your looks; the earl will not care for you any more.’  Sometimes he brought his friends to see me, ‘because I was such a lovely child,’ and if they did not agree with him on that point he left without kissing me.  Throughout my whole girlhood I was taught nothing but to please him, and the only way to do that was to be pretty.  It was the only virtue worth striving for; the others were never thought of when he asked how I was getting on.  Once I had fever and nearly died, yet this knowledge that my face was everything was implanted in me so that my fear lest he should think me ugly when I recovered terrified me into hysterics.  I dream still that I am in that fever and all my fears return.  He did think me ugly when he saw me next.  I remember the incident so well still.  I had run to him, and he was lifting me up to kiss me when he saw that my face had changed.  ‘What a cruel disappointment,’ he said, and turned his back on me.  I had given him a child’s love until then, but from that day I was hard and callous.”