He had often laughed
at her in the same way.
"And where is he now?" she said, with a compressed lip.
"At school. Where, I don't tell you. You know why. But he's looked after
by me, and d----d well looked after, too."
She hesitated, composed her face with an effort, parted her lips, and
looked out of the window into the gathering darkness. Then after a
moment she said slowly, yet with a certain precision:--
"And his mother? Do you ever talk to him of HER? Does--does he ever
speak of ME?"
"What do you think?" he said comfortably, changing his position in the
chair, and trying to read her face in the shadow. "Come, now. You don't
know, eh? Well--no! NO! You understand. No! He's MY friend--MINE! He's
stood by me through thick and thin. Run at my heels when everybody else
fled me. Dodged vigilance committees with me, laid out in the brush with
me with his hand in mine when the sheriff's deputies were huntin' me;
shut his jaw close when, if he squealed, he'd have been called another
victim of the brute Horncastle, and been as petted and canoodled as
you."
It would have been difficult for any one but the woman who knew the man
before her to have separated his brutish delight in paining her from
another feeling she had never dreamt him capable of,--an intense
and fierce pride in his affection for his child. And it was the more
hopeless to her that it was not the mere sentiment of reciprocation,
but the material instinct of paternity in its most animal form.
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