With a valiant effort, the power of which Falconer must have appreciated had he been able to penetrate beyond the ghastly artificiality of the result, Mrs. Romayne rallied her forces, and strove to throw his words back upon him; to defend and entrench herself once and for all with the only weapon she knew. She broke into a thin, tuneless laugh. “What an absolutely gruesome catechism!” she cried. “Really, it would take me weeks of solitary confinement and meditation among the tombs--isn’t there a book about that, by-the-bye?--before I could approach it in a duly sepulchral spirit. Do you know, it would be an absolute relief to me if you could come to the point? I am taking it for granted, you see, that there is a point, which is no doubt a compliment which its infinitesimal nature hardly deserves. Produce the poor little thing, for heaven’s sake!” “The point is this,” said Falconer grimly and concisely. “Your son’s life, as you know it, is a lie. He has a sordid version of what is known as an ‘establishment.’ He is living with a work-girl in Camden Town.” There was a choked, strangled sound, and Mrs. Romayne’s figure seemed to shrink together as though every muscle had contracted in one simultaneous throb. Her face, could Falconer have seen it, was rigid and blank, except for her eyes. For that first instant she looked as a patient might look who, having suspected himself of a deadly disease, having congratulated himself on the subsidence of his symptoms and known hope, learns from his physician that that subsidence of obvious symptoms was in itself only a more dangerous symptom still, and that he is indeed doomed. Her eyes were the eyes of a woman who looks despair full in the face. But with no human being who keeps hold of life and reason can the vivid agony of such a vision endure for more than an instant. It dulls by reason of its very insupportableness. Time is an empty word where mental suffering is concerned, and the second-hand of the tall clock in the corner had traversed its dial only once before a kind of film passed over those agonised eyes, and Mrs. Romayne spoke in a thin, hoarse voice. And the man so close to her was conscious of nothing but a short pause, and was revolted accordingly. “How do you know?” Even in that moment the instinct of defiance of him personally could not wholly yield, and lingered in her voice. “I have an old servant who lives in Camden Town. He is an invalid, and I occasionally visit him. His wife is a garrulous woman, and thinking that I have some claim on her gratitude, considers it necessary to inform me as to all her own and her neighbours’ affairs. Visiting the husband last Friday week, I found the wife greatly excited and alarmed for the reputation of the street--in which she lets lodgings--by the appearance in the house opposite of a couple whose relations to one another had instantly been suspected by their landlady and her neighbours, though they passed as newly-made man and wife!”