to seem to seek or urge any information at
all; all was to come spontaneously from her. She, feeling the
difficulty of telling what she had to tell, and always oppressed with
the recollection of what it had cost her to make her revelation to
this selfsame man nineteen years ago. She wished he would give the
conversation some lift, as he had done before, when he asked if what
she had to tell referred to her husband. But, although he would gladly
have repeated his assistance, he could see his way to nothing, this
time, that seemed altogether free from risk. How if he were to
blunder into ascribing to her something more culpable than her actual
share in the past? She half guessed this; then, seeing that speech
must come from herself in the end, took heart and faced the position
resolutely. She always did.

"You know this, Fenwick, do you not, that when there is a divorce, the
husband takes the children from their mother--always, when she is in
the wrong; too often, when she is blameless. I have told you I was the
one to blame, and I tell you now that though my husband's application
for a divorce failed, from a technical point of law, all things came
about just as though he had succeeded. Don't analyse it now; take it
all for granted--you understand?"

"I understand. Suppose it so! And then?"

"And then this. That little monkey of mine--that little unconscious
fiddling thing in there"--and as Mrs. Nightingale speaks, the sound of
a caress mixes with the laugh in her voice; but the pain comes back as
she goes on--"My Sallykin has been mine, all her life! My poor husband
never saw her in her childhood." As she says the word _husband_
she has again a vivid _eclat_ of the consciousness that it is
he--himself--sitting there beside her. And the odd thought that mixes
itself into this, strange to say, is--"The pity of it! To think how
little he has had of Sally in all these years!"

He, for his part, can for the moment make nothing of this part of
the story. He can give his head the lion-mane shake she knows him by
so well, but it brings him no light. He is reduced to mere slow
repetition of her data; his hand before his eyes to keep his brain,
that has to think, clear of distractions from without.

"Your husband never saw her. She has been yours all her life. Had she
been your husband's child, he would have exercised his so-called
rights--his _legal_ rights--and taken her away. Are those the
facts--so far?"

"Yes--go on.