“Badness? ... in that child?” he exclaimed.

She gave an impatient, angry gesture.

“Dear me, you are perfectly obsessed by ‘that child,’ as you call her!” she answered—­“You had better know the truth then at once,—­ ‘that child’ is my daughter!”

“Your daughter?—­your—­your—­”

The words died on his lips—­he staggered slightly as though under a sudden physical blow, and gripped the mantelpiece behind him with one hand.

“Good God!” he half whispered—­“What do you mean?—­you have had no children—­”

“Not by you,—­no!” she said, with a flash of scorn—­“Not in marriage, that church-and-law form of union!—­but by love and passion—­yes!  Stop!—­do not look at me like that!  I have not been false to you—­I have not betrayed you!  Your honour has been safe with me!  It was before I met you that this thing happened.”

He stood rigid and very pale.

“Before you met me?”

“Yes.  I was a silly, romantic, headstrong girl,—­my parents were compelled to go abroad, and I was left in the charge of one of my mother’s society friends—­a thoroughly worldly, unprincipled woman whose life was made up of intrigue and gambling.  And I ran away with a man—­Pierce Armitage—­”

“Pierce Armitage!”

The name broke from him like a cry of agony.

“Yes—­Pierce Armitage.  Did you know him?”

He looked at her with eyes in which there was a strange horror.

“Know him?  He was my best friend!”

She shrugged her shoulders, and a slight weary smile parted her lips.

“Well, you never told me,—­I have never heard you mention his name.  But the world is a small place!—­and when I was a girl he was beginning to be known by a good many people.  Anyhow, he threw up everything in the way of his art and work, and ran away with me.  I went quite willingly—­I took a maid whom we bribed,—­we pretended we were married, and we had a charming time together—­a time of real romance, till he began to get tired and want change—­ all men are like that!  Then he became a bore with a bad temper.  He certainly behaved very well when he knew the child was coming, and offered to marry me in real earnest—­but I refused.”

“You refused!” Lord Blythe echoed the words in a kind of stupefied wonderment.

“Of course I did.  He was quite poor—­and I should have been miserable running about the world with a man who depended on art for a living.  Besides he was ceasing to be a lover—­and as a husband he would have been insupportable.  We managed everything very well—­my own people were all in India—­and my mother’s friend, if she guessed my affair, said nothing about it,—­wisely enough for her own sake!—­so that when my time came I was able to go away on an easy pretext and get it all over secretly.  Pierce came and stayed in a hotel close at hand—­he was rather in a fright lest I should die!—­it would have been such an awkward business for him!—­however, all went well, and when I had quite recovered he took the child away from me, and left it at an old farmhouse he had once made a drawing of, saying he would call back for it—­as if it were a parcel!” She laughed lightly.  “He wrote and told me what he had done and gave me the address of the farm—­ then he went abroad, and I never heard of him again—­”