Their little boy …” Suddenly she stood up with a proud and noble movement and leaned to me across the desk. “I am that woman,” she said.

            She straightened herself and stood there, trembling, erect, like a swathed figure of woe on an illustrious grave. I thought: “What this inexpressive woman was meant to express is grief—” and marvelled at the wastefulness of Nature. But suddenly she dropped back into her chair, bowed her face against the desk, and burst into sobs. Her sobs were not violent; they were soft, low, almost rhythmical, with lengthening intervals between, like the last drops of rain after a long down-pour; and I said to myself: “She’s cried so much that this must be the very end.”

            She opened the jet bag, took out a delicate handkerchief, and dried her eyes. Then she turned to me again. “It’s the first time I’ve ever spoken of this … to any human being except one.”

            I laid my hand on hers. “It was no use—my pretending,” she went on, as if appealing to me for justification.

            “Is it ever? And why should you, with an old friend?” I rejoined, attempting to comfort her.

            “Ah, but I’ve had to—for so many years; to be silent has become my second nature.” She paused, and then continued in a softer tone: “My baby was so beautiful … do you know, Mr. Norcutt, I’m sure I should know him anywhere…. Just two years and one month older than my second boy, Philip … the one you knew.” Again she hesitated, and then, in a warmer burst of confidence, and scarcely above a whisper: “We christened the eldest Stephen. We knew it was dangerous: it might give a clue—but I felt I must give him his father’s name, the name I loved best. … It was all I could keep of my baby. And Stephen understood; he consented. …”

            I sat and stared at her. What! This child of hers that she was telling me of was the child of Stephen Glenn? The two had had a child two years before the birth of their lawful son Philip? And consequently nearly a year before their marriage? I listened in a stupor, trying to reconstruct in my mind the image of a new, of another, Stephen Glenn, of the suffering reckless man behind the varnished image familiar to me. Now and then I murmured: “Yes … yes …” just to help her to go on.

            “Of course it was impossible to keep the baby with me. Think—at my uncle’s! My poor uncle … he would have died of it….”

            “And so you died instead?”

            I had found the right word; her eyes filled again, and she stretched her hands to mine. “Ah, you’ve understood! Thank you. Yes; I died,” She added: “Even when Philip was born I didn’t come to life again—not wholly. Because there was always Stevie … part of me belonged to Stevie forever.”

            “But when you and Glenn were able to marry, why—?”

            She hung her head, and the blood rose to her worn temples. “Ah, why? … Listen; you mustn’t blame my husband. Try to remember what life was thirty years ago in New York. He had his professional standing to consider. A woman with a shadow on her was damned. … I couldn’t discredit Stephen…. We knew positively that our baby was in the best of hands. …”

            “You never saw him again?”

            She shook her head. “It was part of the agreement—with the persons who took him. They wanted to imagine he was their own. We knew we were fortunate … to find such a safe home, so entirely beyond suspicion … we had to accept the conditions.” She looked up with a faint flicker of reassurance in her eyes. “In a way it no longer makes any difference to me—the interval.