saw from their guilty looks that it was true. My own
Brian was dead, and I was left with Vincenza's child, and expected to
love it as my own.

"For nobody believed me. My husband never believed me. He maintained to
the very last that you were his child and mine. I fought like a wild
beast for my dead child's rights; but even I was mastered in the end.
They threatened me--yes, James Colquhoun, in my husband's name,
threatened me--with a madhouse, if I did not put away from me the
suspicion that I had conceived. They assured me that Brian was not dead;
that it was Vincenza's child that had died; that I was incapable of
distinguishing one baby from another--and so on. They said that I should
be separated from my own boy--my Richard, whom I tenderly loved--unless
I put away from me this 'insane fancy,' and treated that Italian baby as
my son. Oh, they were cruel to me--very cruel. But they got their way. I
yielded because I could not bear to leave my husband and my boy. I let
them place the child in my arms, and I learnt to call it Brian. I buried
the secret in my own heart, but I was never once moved from my opinion.
My own child was buried at San Stefano, and the boy that I took back
with me to England was the gardener's son. You were that boy.

"I was silent about your parentage, but I never loved you, and my
husband knew that I did not. For that reason, I suppose, he made you his
favourite. He petted you, caressed you more than was reasonable or
right. Only once did any conversation on the subject pass between us. He
had refused to punish you when you were a boy of ten, and had quarrelled
with Richard. 'Mark my words,' I said to him, 'there will be more
quarrelling, and with worse results, if you do not put a stop to it now.
I should never trust a lad of Italian blood.' He looked at me, turning
pale as he looked. 'Have you not forgotten that unhappy delusion, then?'
he said. 'It is no delusion,' I answered him, composedly, 'to remind
myself sometimes that this boy--Brian, as you call him--is the son of
Giovanni Vasari and his wife.' 'Margaret,' he said, 'you are a mad
woman!' He went out, shutting the door hastily behind him. But he never
misunderstood me again. Do you know what were his last words to me upon
his death-bed? 'Don't tell him,' he said, pointing to you with his weak,
dying hand, 'If you ever loved me, Margaret, don't tell him.' And then
he died, before I had promised not to tell. If I had promised then, I