John Parke woke next morning to see his wife in her dressing gown, moving vaguely about the room, a shadow against the full summer light that came in at all the windows. He could not make out at first what she was doing, prowling about in a curious monotonous round from window to window, pausing to look out, as it seemed, at the edge of the blind, first of one, then of another. He watched her for a little while in vague alarm. During all this time a vague but painful suspicion was in John’s mind. He knew better than anyone how she had looked forward to a new state of affairs. Had she not drawn even him to that vile anticipation to plan and calculate upon the boy’s death? The pain of the thought that he had done so made more intense his sense of the terrible revulsion in her mind when all these horrible hopes came to an end. He was not a man who naturally divined what was going on in the minds of others, but the movement in his own, on this occasion, and the instinctive knowledge which long years of companionship had vaguely, magnetically conveyed to him about his wife—not a matter of reflection or reason, but simply of impression—kept a dull light about Letitia which surrounded no other person upon earth. Something like sympathy mingled with and increased his power of comprehending during this dreadful crisis. How would she make up her mind to it, he asked himself, notwithstanding the horror and shame with which he thought of the calculations he himself had been seduced into sharing. He knew very well how little she liked to be foiled, how she struggled against disappointment, and got her will in defiance of every combination of circumstances. During all the previous day he had been very uneasy, certain that in her long absence she was planning something, wondering what she could plan that would have any effect upon the present state of affairs—fearing—he knew not what. John could not allow himself to think that his wife would contemplate harming the boy. Oh, no, no! such a thought was not in his mind. Letitia had her faults. She had never been kind to Mar. She had thought of him as an interloper, as an intruder, as supplanting Duke—and she had not concealed her feeling. But harm him—by so much as a touch. Oh, no! no! Nevertheless, John had been very uneasy all day, and even in his sleep this gnawing discomfort had not left him. He had dreamed of deathbeds and dying persons, and of strange scenes of chaos in which she was always present, though he knew not for what purpose. And when he woke suddenly and saw her wandering about the room in the high clear morning light like a ghost, all the uneasiness of the previous day, all the troubled dreams of the night came back upon his heart. He watched her for a minute without making any sign, and then he called “Letitia!” His voice made her start violently—but she came towards him at once, wrapping her dressing-gown round her as though she felt cold.

“Isn’t it very early? Why are you prowling about at this hour?”

“Yes, I suppose it’s early. I couldn’t sleep—one cannot always sleep when one would.”

“You are not such a bad sleeper as you think,” said John—as have said before him, in the calm of experience, the partners of many a restless wife and husband. “And I wish,” he added impatiently, “that you’d let me sleep, at least.”

Instead of quenching him by a sharp word, as was Letitia’s wont, she came towards the bedside and sat down, turning her back to the light. “John,” she said, “there has been a great deal happening while you have been asleep.”

“What?” he cried. He raised himself up on his elbow, terrified, threatening. “Letitia, for God’s sake, don’t tell me that anything has happened to the boy.”

“Oh, the boy!” she cried, with an impatience that was balm to his heart. Then she went on, not looking at him, “Fancy, who arrived last night—Mary, looking for her child——”

“Lady Frogmore!”

“Mary—and calling for her child—she who always denied that she ever had one. She came flying upon me in his room, and seized hold of me and dragged me out of it; mad—mad—as mad again—as—as a March hare.” Her lips parted in a harsh laugh. “I believe she would have torn me to pieces if I had not taken to my heels. You know there is nothing in the world I am so frightened of as madness—nothing! I took to my heels——”

“Wait a bit,” said John, “wait, I don’t understand. She came in the middle of the night to see her child?”

“Agnes must have put her up to it. Agnes must have got it into her head at last that she had a child.”

“And you were in his room? What were you doing in his room, Letitia? You have never nursed him. You were asleep when I came upstairs.”

She gave him a momentary glance—half of defiance, half of alarm—and yet she had thought of this, too. “I fancied the nurse looked sleepy—the night nurse, you know, John—I thought she looked drowsy, and I stole back to listen. Well, I did, for she was asleep. I went into see that all was right for the night—his drink——”

Even Letitia’s nerve was not enough for this. She shivered. “It is cold at this hour in the morning,” she said, her teeth chattering.

“Did you give him anything to drink?” John would not have dared to confess to himself what dread apprehension went through his heart. And it was dreadful for him to talk of it, though she was so wonderful in self-command.

“I?—oh, no. I gave him nothing. I have not nursed him, you know. I saw that all was there that he could want, and was going to rouse the nurse, when somebody came upon me and took me by the shoulders. At first I thought it was you.”

“Why should you think that I would take you by the shoulders?” His suspicion was not quenched, but seized upon every word.

“Yes,” she said, “why should I? I thought, perhaps, you were angry with me for being there at all.”

“Why should I be angry with you,” he asked again, “for being there?” never taking his eyes from her face.

On her part she never looked towards him, but continued impatiently, “I don’t suppose I thought of the whys and the wherefores. I thought it was you, that was all. And when I found it was Mary—I don’t know whether she dragged me out or I pushed her out. Above all I feared a noise to wake the boy.”

John gave her a long searching look. He did not want to find her out. He wanted her to clear herself from all suspicions, from all doubt. “Ah, the boy!” he said, with a long-drawn breath, “the poor boy! Did you wake him? It might have been as much as his life was worth.”

“You think of nothing else,” she said. Then with a sort of indulgence to his weakness, “Your boy never stirred.” She breathed forth heavily a sigh—was it of thankfulness?

“I suppose he was sleeping,” she added, with a sort of bravado, “I did not look.”

“Good God!” cried John, springing up, “was there any doubt? Had you any doubt?” He seized his dressing-gown and thrust his arms into the sleeves, and his feet into slippers.

“Aye,” cried Letitia, still without a movement, without even looking at him, “go and see. Nothing would make me face that woman again.”

She sat idly playing with a ring upon her finger, turning it round and round, but neither raised her head nor looked at him, though he paused before her with again the searching look of anxiety which he dared not define.

“Letitia,” he said, “for God’s sake what do you mean? There is something in all this I don’t understand.”

“Ah, don’t I speak plain enough?” she said. “It’s Mary come back, and as mad as a March hare.”

“And you left her—a woman—in that state—alone with the boy, just out of the jaws of death? What’s that on your gown?”

She looked at it, bending forward to see—a long streak as of something spilt. The stain was stiff, giving a rigid line to the stuff—and what John suspected, feared it to be, cannot be put into words. His eyes grew wild with terror, and his voice hoarse, as he repeated:—

“On your gown? What is it? What is it?”

“Oh, the milk!” Letitia said. It brought everything before her, and a shiver ran over her again; but also a laugh, which, though tuneless enough, gave the distracted man by her side some comfort, for she could not have laughed surely if it had been——“We spilt it between us,” Letitia said, “and mad as she was she drew back for that, not to spoil her dress. She had her senses enough for that.”

He stood in front of her for a moment, undecided what to do, when she suddenly raised her head and cried sharply, “John, why don’t you go and see?”

“I can’t understand you,” he said. “You mean more than I know.”

She looked up at him again and laughed in a way that froze his blood. “Don’t I always?” she said, with a tone of contempt. Then added, stamping on the floor, “Go—go and see what has happened. I will never see that woman again.”

John went softly along the corridor, half dressed, ashamed, miserable. Something had happened more than he could understand, perhaps more than he would ever understand. The house was all silent, wrapt as in a garment in the morning sunshine, which came in by the great staircase windows and flooded everything. It was still very early. His step made a sound which ran all through and through it. He could not be noiseless as the women were, who stole about, and met, and had their encounters, and nobody was ever the wiser. He thought it was in the middle of the night that this arrival must have occurred which seemed to him like a dream, and which as he passed through the sleeping house and felt the stillness of it he began to think must be but some wild fancy of his wife’s, something which could not be true. When he pushed open the door of the ante-room a dark figure rose hurriedly out of a chair, and met him with the dazed look of a person disturbed and half asleep. “Miss Hill!” he cried. Then it was true!

She put up her hand and said “Hush.” Then, after a moment, “He is asleep, like a baby; he has never stirred.”

“Are you sure—that he is asleep?”

“Oh, I thought that myself,” she cried, understanding him. “He was so quiet. Yes, yes, he is asleep; breathing faintly, but you can hear him. Oh, safe and sound asleep!”

“My wife told me—his mother——”

“She is there,” said Agnes, beckoning him to the door of the inner room. He stood and looked in for a moment, with his clouded and troubled face, leaning against the lintel. Mary’s ear had been caught by the sound. She looked up and met his eyes with that ethereal clearness of countenance, the exaltation of her aroused and awakened soul. She looked him in the face with a mild serenity and peace and smiled in recognition, then turned her eyes to the bed as if to show him the boy softly sleeping there. Behind, the nurse still slept in the easy chair. To John it seemed as if it were all a dream, of which there was no explanation. How did it come about that the sick room had passed into the keeping of these two, arriving mysteriously during the night, whom his wife must have risen from his side to receive, of whom he had heard nothing? The nurse asleep, all the usual faces gone, the mother who had disowned him sitting in that attitude of love by Mar’s side—what did it all mean?

“This is all very strange,” he said, drawing back from the door. “I find you here in possession whom I thought far away—and the mother who was so estranged. Did you come down from the skies? Is it safe to leave her there? Is she——”

Agnes looked at the man who was comparatively little known to her, who was a man, frightening and disturbing in his strange undress in the midst of the silent house. She was an elderly single woman, unaccustomed to give any account of herself to strange men, and her weariness and all the unusual circumstances told upon her. Her lips quivered and her eyes filled. “Oh,” she said, “Mr. Parke, do not think we meant any—any reproach. Things have happened that have brought my sister to her full senses—and to remember everything. I could not keep her from her boy—you would not keep her from her boy——”

“Not if she is sane; not if it is safe,” said John. He looked in again through the half closed door. Once more Mary’s keen ear caught the sound; and again she turned towards him her face, which was like the morning sky. She had never been beautiful in her best and youngest days. Now with her grey hair ruffled by the night’s vigil, her mild eyes cleared from any film that had been upon them, lambent and inspired with watchful love, her look overawed the anxious spectator. He stepped back again with a sort of apologetic humility. “I don’t understand it,” he said. “You seem to have some meaning among you that I don’t know: but I cannot be the one to disturb her. I hope—I hope that I am making no mistake——”

“You are making no mistake, Mr. Parke,” said Agnes. “Mar was my child more than hers; he was my baby. My heart was nearly broken, for I thought he was dying when I came here last night. But I trust him in his mother’s hands. I give place to her because it is her right. Do you think I would leave my boy to her if she were not in her full senses, ready to defend him, ready to protect him——?”

She stopped, choked with the sobs, which, in her great exhaustion and emotion, Agnes could no longer entirely keep down.

“To defend him—to protect him? From what? from what?” John said.

“Oh, how can I tell? From the perils and dangers of the night; from carelessness and any ill wish.”

John’s voice was choked as that of Agnes’ had been. “There is no ill wish,” he said—“none—to Mar in this house.”

He saw, as he spoke, the traces on the floor of something spilt like that on his wife’s gown—and some fragments of the broken glass which had escaped Agnes’ scrutiny. He did not know what they meant. He was not clever, nor had he any imagination to divine; but something went through him like a cold blast, chilling him to the heart. He paused a moment, staring at the floor, and the words died away on his lips.

When John returned to his wife’s room Letitia was in bed, and to all appearance fast asleep. The poor man was glad, if such a word could be applied to anything he was capable of feeling. He withdrew softly into his dressing-room, and sat there for a long time with his head in his hands and his face hidden. What to think of the mysterious things that had passed that night he did not know.