as
to know, but how much there had been that she had never even suspected!

Those words--that admission--as to Fanny Bellair being a good mother
would never have passed Mrs. Elwyn's lips--they would never even have
been credited by her had she known the truth--the truth, that is, as to
the child to whom Mrs. Bellair was so passionately devoted, and who now,
it seemed, was ailing. That secret, and Hugh Elwyn thanked God, not
irreverently, that it was so, was only shared by two human beings, that
is by Fanny and himself. And perhaps, Fanny, like himself, had managed
by now almost to forget it....

Elwyn swung out of the house, he walked up South Street, and so into
Park Lane and over to the Park railings. There was still a great deal of
traffic in the roadway, but the pavements were deserted.

As he began to walk quickly westward, the past came back and overwhelmed
him as with a great flood of mingled memories. And it was not, as his
mother would probably have visioned it, a muddy spate filled with
unclean things. Rather was it a flood of exquisite spring waters,
instinct with the buoyant head-long rushes of youth, and filled with
clear, happy shallows, in which retrospectively he lay and sunned
himself in the warmth of what had been a great love--love such as
Winifred Fanshawe, with her thin, complaisant nature, would never
bestow.

The mother's imprudent words of unnecessary warning had brought back to
her son everything she had hoped was now, if not obliterated, then
repented of; but Elwyn's heart was filled to-night with a vague
tenderness for the half-forgotten woman whom he had loved awhile with so
passionate and absorbing a love, and to whom, under cover of that poor
and wilted thing, his conscience, he had ultimately behaved so ill.

Hugh Elwyn's mind travelled back across the years, to the very beginning
of his involved account with honour--that account which he believed to
be now straightened out.

Jim Bellair had been Elwyn's friend--first college friend and then
favourite "pal." When Bellair had fallen head over ears in love with a
girl still in the schoolroom, a girl not even pretty, but with wonderful
auburn hair and dark, startled-looking eyes, and had finally persuaded,
cajoled, badgered her into saying "Yes," it was Hugh Elwyn who had been
Bellair's rather sulky best man. Small wonder that the bridegroom had
half-jokingly left his young wife in Elwyn's charge when he had had to
go half across the w