"In a hidden way--yes. That is what I am coming to. When I first saw Mrs. Gareth-Lawless sitting under her tree--" He suddenly stopped. "No," harshly, "I need not put it into words to _you_." Then a pause as if for breath. "She had a way of lifting her eyes as a very young angel might--she had a quivering spirit of a smile--and soft, deep curled corners to her mouth. You saw the same things in the old photograph you bought. The likeness was--Oh! it was hellish that such a resemblance could be! In less than half an hour after she spoke to me I had shut another door. But I was obliged to go and _look_ at her again and again. The resemblance drew me. By the time her husband died I knew her well enough to be sure what would happen. Some man would pick her up and throw her aside--and then some one else. She could have held nothing long. She would have passed from one hand to another until she was tossed into the gutter and swept away--quivering spirit of a smile and all of it. I could not have shut any door on that. I prevented it--and kept her clean--by shutting doors right and left. I have watched over her. At times it has bored me frightfully. But after a year or so--behind another door I had shut the child." "Robin? I had sometimes thought so," said the Duchess. "I did not know why exactly. It was not affection or attraction. It was a sort of resentment of the beastly unfairness of things. The bottomless gulf seemed to yawn in her path when she was nothing but a baby. Everything was being tossed into it before she had taken a step. I began to keep an eye on her and prevent things--or assist them. It was more fury than benevolence, but it has gone on for years--behind the shut door." "Are you quite sure you have been entirely free from all affection for her?" The Duchess asked the question impersonally though with a degree of interest. "I think so. I am less sure that I have the power to feel what is called 'affection' for any one. I think that I have felt something nearer it for Donal--and for you--than for any one else. But when the child talked to me in the wood I felt for the first time that I wished her to know that my relation to her mother was not the reason for her hating me which she had believed." "She shall be made to understand," said the Duchess. "She must," he said, "_because of the rest_." The last four words were, as it were, italicised. Now, she felt, she was probably about to hear the chief thing he had been approaching. So she waited attentively. "Behind a door has been shut another thing," he said and he endeavoured to say it with his usual detached rigidity of calm, but did not wholly succeed. "It is the outcome of the generations and the centuries at present diminishing in value and dignity. The past having had its will of me and the present and future having gripped me--if I had had a son--"