"Nursed him!" said Lady Dunstable, quickly. She had risen, and was leaning against the mantelpiece, looking sharply down upon her visitor.
"That was the beginning of it all. He was ill in the winter--in his lodgings."
"I never heard of it!" For the first time, there was a touch of something natural and passionate in the voice.
"I never heard a word of it! And this--this creature nursed him?" The tone of the robbed lioness at last!--singularly inappropriate under all the circumstances. Doris struggled on.
"An actor friend of your son brought her to see him. And she really devoted herself to him. He declared to me he owed her a great deal--"
"He need have owed her nothing," said Lady Dunstable, sternly. "He had only to send a postcard--a wire--to his own people."
"He thought--you were so busy," said Doris, dropping her eyes to the carpet.
A sound of contemptuous anger showed that her shaft--her mild shaft--had gone home. She hurried on--"But at last I got him to promise me to wait a week. That was yesterday at five o'clock. He wouldn't promise me to write to you--or his father. He seemed so desperately anxious to settle it all--in his own way. But I said a good deal about your name--and the family--and the horrible pain he would be giving--any way. Was it kind--was it right towards you, not only to give you _no_ opportunity of helping or advising him--but also to take no steps to find out whether the woman he was going to marry was--not only unsuitable, wholly unsuitable--that, of course, he knows--but _a disgrace_? I argued with him that he must have some suspicion of the stories she has told him at different times, or he wouldn't have tried to protect himself in this particular way. He didn't deny it; but he said she had looked after him, and been kind to him, when nobody else was, and he should feel a beast if he pressed her too hardly."
"'When nobody else was'!" repeated Lady Dunstable, scornfully, her voice trembling with bitterness. "Really, Mrs. Meadows, it is very difficult for me to believe that my son ever used such words!"
Doris hesitated, then she raised her eyes, and with the happy feeling of one applying the scourge, in the name of Justice, she said with careful mildness:--