wife talked and cried, and cried and talked all the afternoon through. “And don’t blame poor Will Markham more than you can help,” she said. “It was a baby when he left the island, and what does a young man think of a baby? It doesn’t seem to count at all. And then my brother had adopted the little thing. It didn’t seem as if it belonged to him.” This appeal to her on behalf of her own husband, wounded Lady Markham almost as much as blame. “I understand how it was,” she replied with proud stoicism; though even at that moment, in hearing him thus defended, there glanced across Lady Markham’s mind a sense of the wrong he had done which was almost intolerable to her. Thus the mind works by contradiction, seeing most distinctly that which it is called upon not to see. Afterwards, Mrs. Lenny told her the whole story of Gus’s young mother, and her love and death, which she listened to with a strange feeling that she herself was the girl who was being talked of, who had died so young. “He was no better than a lad himself,” Mrs. Lenny said. “I don’t doubt that it was like a dream to him. When Lenny and I talked to him first he did not seem to understand about the boy.” “You talked to him then--about--his son?” “That was what we came for, surely,” said Mrs. Lenny, “that was what we came for. We knew nothing about you, my dear lady, and we didn’t know there was a family. When I heard of your fine young gentleman that was to be the heir,--God bless him!--you might have knocked me down with a straw; and I told Will he should make a clean breast of it. But do you think a man, and a great statesman, would take a woman’s advice? They think they know better, and he would not. He thought nothing would ever happen, poor Will! And here it’s come upon you like a tempest, without a word of warning.” “We will say no more about it,” said Lady Markham.