"Well, my dear, very very soon, he made of me his friend, and I was of course greatly flattered, but at that time, in the ordinary sense of the word, St. Amant never made love to me." She went on more firmly. "Of course I soon came to know that he cared for me in a way he did not care for the other women with whom his name was associated. I knew very soon too, deep in my heart, that if his wife--his frivolous, mean-natured, tiresome wife--died, he certainly would wish to marry me, and for years, Oliver, for something like six years, I daily committed murder in my heart." And then something happened which troubled and greatly startled the woman who was making this painful confession. Her son gave a kind of cry--a stifled cry which was almost a groan. "God! How well I understand that!" he said. "Do you, Oliver--do you? And yet I, looking back, cannot understand it! All that was best, indeed the only good that was in St. Amant to give I had then, and later, after I became a widow, I had it again." "I suppose he was much the same then as later, or--or was he different then, mother?" She knew what he meant. "He was the same then," she said quietly, "but somehow I didn't care! Girls were kept so ignorant in those days. But of course the whole world knew he was a man of pleasure, and in time I grew to know it too. But still it wasn't that which made me unhappy, for I did not realise what the phrase meant, still less what was implied by it. But even so, as time went on I was very unhappy. Mine was a false position--a position which hurt my pride, and, looking back, I suppose that there must have soon been a certain amount of muffled talk. If I was not jealous, other women were certainly jealous of me." She waited for a few moments; the stirring of these long-dead embers was hurting her more than she would have thought possible. At last she went on: "Sometimes months would pass by without our meeting, but he wrote to me constantly, and on his letters--such amusing, clever, and yes, tender letters--I lived. My aunt, my father, both singularly blind to the state of things, were surprised and annoyed that I didn't marry, and, as for me, I grew more and more unhappy." "Poor mother!" muttered Oliver. And she sighed a sigh of rather piteous relief. She had not thought he would understand. "I don't know what I should have done but for two people, your father, who of course was living here then, our nearest neighbour, and, what meant very much more to me just then, Laura's mother, Alice Tropenell. Though she was only a very distant relation, she was like a daughter in this house. Alice was my one friend. She knew everything about me. She was--well, Oliver, I could never tell you what she was to me then!" "I suppose," he said slowly, "that Laura is like her?" "Laura?" Mrs. Tropenell could not keep the surprise out of her low voice. "Oh no, my dear, Laura is not in the least like her mother. But Laura's child is very like Alice--even now."