Up and down his face her eyes travelled, seeing if she could detect anywhere a trace of reluctance, and searched in vain.
“Absolutely. There’s no question about it.”
“Oh, it’s too much,” she whispered. “You and Stanier both mine. My heart won’t hold it all.”
“Hearts are wonderfully elastic,” said he. “One’s heart holds everything it desires, if only it can get it. Now there’s a little more to tell you.”
She drew him down on to the sofa beside her.
“Well, my uncle sent me these letters,” said he, “but, naturally, they won’t be enough by themselves. It was necessary to find out what was the entry in the register of their marriage. My father had told me where it took place, at the British Consulate in Naples, and I got the Consul to let me see the register. I told him I wanted to make a copy of it. I saw it. The marriage apparently took place not on the 31st of March, but on the 1st. But then I looked more closely, and saw that there had been an erasure. In front of the ‘1’ there had been another figure. But whoever had made that erasure had not done it quite carefully enough. It was possible to see that a ‘3’ had been scratched out. The date as originally written was ‘31’ not ‘1.’ That tallies with the date on my mother’s letter.”
Colin’s voice took on an expression of tenderness, incredibly sweet.
“Vi, darling,” he said, “you must try to forgive my father, if it was he who made or caused to be made that erasure which might so easily have passed unnoticed, as indeed it did, for when the Consul prepared my copy with the original he saw nothing of it; word by word he went over the two together. You must forgive him, though it was a wicked and a terrible fraud that my father--I suppose--practised, for unless he had other children, he was robbing you of all that was rightfully yours.
“I think the reconstruction of it is easy enough. My mother died, and he was determined that his son, one of them, should succeed. I imagine he made, or procured the making, of that erasure after my mother’s death. He had meant to marry her, indeed he did marry her, and I think he must have desired to repair the wrong, the bitter wrong, he did her in the person of her children. I’ve got something to forgive him, too, and willingly I do that. We must both forgive him, Vi. I the bastard, and you the heiress of Stanier.”