She turned to look at him, nodding silently. "Where is he?" "In London. It was about him--I came down here. I--I--want to get rid of him." A look of horror crossed his face, as though in her faint yet violent words he caught the echoes of an intolerable past. But he controlled himself. "Tell me more--I want to help you." "You--you won't get any joy of him!" she said, still staring at him. "He's not like other children--he's afflicted. It was a bad doctor--when I was confined--up in the hills near Lucca. The child was injured. There's nothing wrong with him--but his brain." A flickering light in Buntingford's face sank. "And you want to get rid of him?" "He's so much trouble," she said peevishly. "I did the best I could for him. Now I can't afford to look after him. I thought of everything I could do--before--" "Before you thought of coming to me?" She assented. A long pause followed, during which Miss Alcott came in, administered stimulant, and whispered to Buntingford to let her rest a little. He sat there beside her motionless, for half an hour or more, unconscious of the passage of time, his thoughts searching the past, and then again grappling dully with the extraordinary, the incredible statement that he possessed a son--a living but, apparently, an idiot son. The light began to fail, and Miss Alcott slipped in noiselessly again to light a small lamp out of sight of the patient. "The doctor will soon be here," she whispered to Buntingford. The light of the lamp roused the woman. She made a sign to Miss Alcott to lift her a little. "Not much," said the Rector's sister in Buntingford's ear. "It's the heart that's wrong." Together they raised her just a little. Miss Alcott put a fan into Buntingford's hands, and opened the windows wider. "I'm all right," said the stranger irritably. "Let me alone. I've got a lot to say." She turned her eyes on Buntingford. "Do you want to know--about Rocca?" "Yes." "He died seven years ago. He was always good to me--awfully good to me and to the boy. We lived in a horrible out-of-the-way place--up in the mountains near Naples. I didn't want you to know about the boy. I wanted revenge. Rocca changed his name to Melegrani. I called myself Francesca Melegrani. I used to exhibit both at Naples and Rome. Nobody ever found out who we were." "What made you put that notice in the _Times_?" She smiled faintly, and the smile recalled to him an old expression of hers, half-cynical, half-defiant.