And, in the meanwhile, how to engineer my discovery? Should I use it to my more crushing indictment of a guilty woman--a bludgeon in my already loaded hand? A gentle son! a human merciful spirit! To admit myself one in purpose with this vulgar conspirator? Never, never! To convince her, rather, of her insensibility to the means for reprisal, for defence, at least, which lay ready to her hand. What was her sin to me, if only she would once expiate it in a word, a look of remorse? I asked for no more. Yet, lacking it, she must lack a faithful Paladin. I had thought I hated her; and it had needed only this menace from another quarter to reawaken all my maddest cravings. She was my mother, and in direful peril. The pity and the sorrow of it quite blinded me for the moment to all subordinate issues. Yet Luck again had served me well for these. I remembered, when the passing of my moody grief left room for other thoughts, how it had put into my hands the one and very clue I needed. I knew at length where to find the old creature--godmother, grandmother, what you will--who alone, it seemed to me, could be induced, or bought, to make the revelation which I desired. Well, even so, that secret were safer in my keeping than solely in a villain’s. Though shared by another, or others, its possession by me could hardly weaken my position as a threatened mother’s champion. For all my wild pity, I was inexorably resolved to take an early opportunity of putting that discovery to the test. And so I fell upon harder reflections. Who was this plausible dog, with his soft voice, his sentimental gaze, his compelling personality? Who was this astute villain--yet none so clever, nevertheless, but that Luck, my Luck, had been able easily to hoodwink him? His hold on Lady Skene must be a substantial one--one so potential of profit, it would appear, that, after all this lapse of years, it was still worth his while to take a house--a gambling office, one might call it--in the neighbourhood, for the sole purpose of exploiting her. How and where had he acquired an incriminating knowledge of her so damning? Alas! had I not learned enough already of her “maiden meditations” to be sceptical of their singleness? She had been an actress--on the stage, at least--and presumably a true child of her traditions. I could not forget Sir Maurice Carnac’s roguish innuendoes--his allusions to my stepfather’s feet “netted” to matrimony in their intended frolic over a wilder course; his sly maudlin reference to me as a pledge of “widowed respectability.” Likely enough he too had known, or guessed, the truth. Likely enough Lord Skene himself had not been so blind to it as the pious throwers of dust in his eyes had once assumed. Nor did I feel convinced that the question of it would much have affected his lordship in those days of his relapse from virtue, so long as its pretensions appeared to justify, in the worldly view,