"I discovered that you had gone away with Rocca--into Italy. I followed you by motor, and got news of you as having gone over the Splugen. My car had a bad accident on the pass, and I was ten weeks in hospital at Chur.

After that I lost all trace."

"I heard of the accident," she said, her eyes all the while searching out the changed details of a face which had once been familiar to her. "But Rocca wasn't with me then. I had only old Zelie--you remember?"

"The old _bonne_--we had at Melun?"

She made a sign of assent.--"I never lived with Rocca--till after the child was born."

"The child! What do you mean?"

The words were a cry. He hung over her, shaken and amazed.

"You never knew!"--There was a faint, ghastly note of triumph in her voice. "I wouldn't tell you--after that night we quarrelled--I concealed it. But he is your son--sure enough."

"My son!--and he is alive?" Buntingford bent closer, trying to see her face.

She turned to look at him, nodding silently.

"Where is he?"

"In London. It was about him--I came down here. I--I--want to get rid of him."

A look of horror crossed his face, as though in her faint yet violent words he caught the echoes of an intolerable past. But he controlled himself.

"Tell me more--I want to help you."

"You--you won't get any joy of him!" she said, still staring at him.

"He's not like other children--he's afflicted. It was a bad doctor--when I was confined--up in the hills near Lucca. The child was injured.

There's nothing wrong with him--but his brain."

A flickering light in Buntingford's face sank.

"And you want to get rid of him?"

"He's so much trouble," she said peevishly. "I did the best I could for him. Now I can't afford to look after him. I thought of everything I could do--before--"

"Before you thought of coming to me?"

She assented. A long pause followed, during which Miss Alcott came in, administered stimulant, and whispered to Buntingford to let her rest a little. He sat there beside her motionless, for half an hour or more, unconscious of the passage of time, his thoughts searching the past, and then again grappling dully with the extraordinary, the incredible statement that he possessed a son--a living but, apparently, an idiot son. The light began to fail, and Miss Alcott slipped in noiselessly again to light a small lamp out of sight of the patient. "The doctor will soon be here," she whispered to Buntingford.

The light of the lamp roused the woman. She made a sign to Miss Alcott to lift her a little.

"Not much," said the Rector's sister in Buntingford's ear. "It's the heart that's wrong."

Together they raised her just a little. Miss Alcott put a fan into Buntingford's hands, and opened the windows wider.

"I'm all right," said the stranger irritably. "Let me alone. I've got a lot to say." She turned her eyes on Buntingford. "Do you want to know--about Rocca?"

"Yes."

"He died seven years ago. He was always good to me--awfully good to me and to the boy. We lived in a horrible out-of-the-way place--up in the mountains near Naples. I didn't want you to know about the boy. I wanted revenge. Rocca changed his name to Melegrani. I called myself Francesca Melegrani. I used to exhibit both at Naples and Rome. Nobody ever found out who we were."

"What made you put that notice in the _Times_?"

She smiled faintly, and the smile recalled to him an old expression of hers, half-cynical, half-defiant.

"I had a pious fit once--when Rocca was very ill. I confessed to an old priest--in the Abruzzi. He told me to go back to you--and ask your forgiveness. I was living in sin, he said--and would go to hell. A dear old fool! But he had some influence with me. He made me feel some remorse--about you--only I wouldn't give up the boy. So when Rocca got well and was going to Lyons, I made him post the notice from there--to the _Times_. I hoped you'd believe it." Then, unexpectedly, she slightly raised her head, the better to see the man beside her.

"Do you mean to marry that girl I saw on the lake?"

"If you mean the girl that I was rowing, she is the daughter of a cousin of mine. I am her guardian."

"She's handsome." Her unfriendly eyes showed her incredulity.

He drew himself stiffly together.

"Don't please waste your strength on foolish ideas. I am not going to marry her, nor anybody."

"You couldn't--till you divorce me--or till I die," she said feebly, her lids dropping again--"but I'm quite ready to see any lawyers--so that you can get free."

"Don't think about that now, but tell me again--what you want me to do."

"I want--to go to--America. I've got friends there. I want you to pay my passage--because I'm a pauper--and to take over the boy."

"I'll do all that. You shall have a nurse--when you are strong enough--who will take you across. Now I must go. Can you just tell me first where the boy is?"

Almost inaudibly she gave an address in Kentish Town. He saw that she could bear no more, and he rose.

"Try and sleep," he said in a voice that wavered. "I'll see you again to-morrow. You're all right here."

She made no reply, and seemed again either asleep or unconscious.

As he stood by the bed, looking down upon her, scenes and persons he had forgotten for years rushed back into the inner light of memory:--that first day in Lebas's atelier when he had seen her in her Holland overall, her black hair loose on her neck, the provocative brilliance of her dark eyes; their close comradeship in the contests, the quarrels, the ambitions of the atelier; her patronage of him as her junior in art, though her senior in age; her increasing influence over him, and the excitement of intimacy with a creature so unrestrained, so gifted, so consumed with jealousies, whether as an artist or a woman; his proposal of marriage to her in one of the straight roads that cut the forest of Compiegne; the ceremony at the Mairie, with only a few of their fellow students for witnesses; the little apartment on the Rive Gauche, with its bits of old furniture, and unframed sketches pinned up on the walls; Anna's alternations of temper, now fascinating, now sulky, and that steady emergence in her of coarse or vulgar traits, like rocks in an ebbing sea; their early quarrels, and her old mother who hated him; their poverty because of her extravagance; his growing reluctance to take her to England, or to present her to persons of his own class and breeding in Paris, and her frantic jealousy and resentment when she discovered it; their scenes of an alternate violence and reconciliation and finally her disappearance, in the company, as he had always supposed, of Sigismondo Rocca, an Italian studying in Paris, whose pursuit of her had been notorious for some time.

The door opened gently, and Miss Alcott's grey head appeared.

"The doctor!" she said, just audibly.

Buntingford followed her downstairs, and found himself presently in Alcott's study, alone with a country doctor well known to him, a man who had pulled out his own teeth in childhood, had attended his father and grandfather before him, and carried in his loyal breast the secrets and the woes of a whole countryside.

They grasped hands in silence.

"You know who she is?" said Buntingford quietly.

"I understand that she tells Mr. Alcott that she was Mrs. Philip Bliss, that she left you fifteen years ago, and that you believed her dead?"

He saw Buntingford shrink.