"Besides, you are worth providing for; more, at any rate than my Lady and Penelope, and I have done that. So I die quits; except for my son Peter. Why didn't he get cholera instead of Marmaduke? I could have spared him.
The enclosure was the copy of the marriage lines which she thought she had seen the old lord in the act of destroying as she had left the room.
Yes, across the middle fold the beginning of a tear slit the paper.
She sat with the letter in her hand until the cry of a child made her rise hastily and go to her task of motherhood.
"And you mean to say," said Peter Muir, when he had heard her tale, "that knowing this imp," he looked at the child she carried, "who is to turn me out, was on the way you burnt that paper found in Marmaduke's despatch-box? I give up. Thank God one does not often meet women of your description!"
But as he spoke he was looking in the child's face.
"He will be the image of his father," he remarked at last, "and, dash it all! but I am glad, yes, glad he's here!" Then, with a shrug of his shoulders, he turned away. "It will be a sell for the Jews, I'm afraid, though it serves the horse-leeches very well right!"
"It need not be a sell at all," replied Marrion. "The child shall have the title--he must have that--but not one penny of the money shall he take till the debts are paid, Mr. Peter! I know the law. I have studied it to find out where I stand; and you are the boy's natural guardian. I"--she spoke bitterly--"am only the mother. I have no say. But I am going to buy freedom from you. Live here--promise me that--use the monies as your own. Keep the old place up for the child; but I will take him for myself. I will bring him up away from the evil traditions of this old house, and when he comes back to it, a man grown, he will be different--even from his father--even, I hope, from me!"
So she said then, but as the years passed little Lord Drummuir came more than once to visit his invalid uncle, for Peter, away from the excitements of town life, defied the doctors for a time. And from the Carpathian pine woods the little lad travelled more than once to a solitary cairn on the Balkan hills by the side of which Andrew Fraser--who never ceased rejoicing that his plain speaking had shown Marrion the wickedness of stealing the bairn's name--would tell him marvellous tales of the dead colonel, his father, and of his prowess in every way.