Part 3 (2/2)
And what was the terrible hurry?”
A guilty grin puckered the little man's lips.
”I thought I knowed you; you're the man of--of yesterday,” he shrilled.
”I was running from Selim. He wanted me to take siesta, but I did wish to be in the hunt.”
Aylmer nodded.
”The usual trouble,” he said. ”We all want to be in--or, at any rate, to see--the hunt. And we never pay any attention to Selims, worse luck.
You'll learn more by experience, sonny.”
The child made a little gesture of protest.
”That's not my name,” he answered solemnly. ”Mother calls me Jackanapes, or Jack. But I'm John, really, just John.”
”Just John,” a.s.sented Aylmer. ”Just John what?”
”John Aylmer,” said the boy and stared in surprise at his new friend's startled visage. But the other John Aylmer was not looking at his namesake. He was looking at the girl who held him.
Her eyes answered the glance gravely, sternly, even defiantly, and in silence.
”You?” cried Aylmer. ”You are--?”
She hesitated.
”John's nurse,” she said, looking him steadily in the face.
CHAPTER III
THE SHADOW OF A NAME
For a moment there was silence between the two. Aylmer's fingers unconsciously wound and unwound a tiny lock of hair in the horse's mane.
His eyes travelled over the woman's face and figure appraisingly; his brows contracted into a frown of puzzlement.
He had seen little John Aylmer's mother once before, at her wedding nine years previously. She had been a girl, then, almost a child, and young for her age, which was barely eighteen. Her beauty had been the fresh, innocent _beaute du diable_. She was fair, blue-eyed, with a tendency to fragility. And if report told the truth, her beauty had wasted and her fragility increased through the cruel years of her husband's domination.
A bare six months ago she had been freed. Her father's millions had helped her to a separation which English Courts had made a legal one.
They had also given her the custody of her one child, the heir to the Aylmer name and the Landon t.i.tle.
This girl was fair, indeed; her eyes like the sea, her color fresh, her forehead bland and unwrinkled. But she was not the woman whose woes had made copy for a thousand newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic, whose sufferings had roused the storm of execration which had made the honest name of Aylmer a byword of dishonor and reproach. No, this was not his cousin Landon's wife.
And yet?
Feature for feature, line for line, she reminded him of the woman whose daintiness he remembered among the ma.s.sed decorations of that New York cathedral those years ago.
He sought bluntly for an explanation.
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