As to that, it was patent at once that it had thrown all the machinery of my life out of gear. The questions of love, duty, resentment, retribution must all be unpieced and readjusted, to suit a new point of view. I had no longer, it appeared, true relations with the old. My position was become one of independence; my attitude one of hard triumphant aloofness. Only the mystery of my being was deepened, not resolved. If my mother’s baby had died, I could not be my mother’s son. That, paradoxically, was the postulate. Then, if not hers, whose son was I, and for what inexplicable reason had she undertaken the risk and responsibility of acknowledging me for her own? That there had been foul play somewhere--trickery, fraud, monstrous imposition--was very plain, I thought. My mission, if it had proved abortive in one direction, had been deadly prolific in another. How to wrench truth from the maze of lies! The wildest theories flashed into my mind, only to be flouted. Was it possible that Lady Skene could have done this donna Quixotic thing for a friend--have imposed on her husband as her own, in some fit of Evangelical Samaritanism, the fruit of a poor sister’s frailty? Out of the question. She was utterly truthful, by temperament and religion. If, on a single occasion, she had let a misunderstanding pass by default, she had had not only the sanction but the encouragement of her Church to justify her. Then Pugsley, at least, believed I was her son, and, as certainly, in all things she believed what Pugsley believed. Granting which, one must grant her innocence of any partnership in a fraud which had apparently imposed upon her, the principal, as it had imposed upon him the unwitting agent. Yet, had it imposed? or was she, after all, a practised queen of guile--a Lamia, with the serpent in her blood? I thought of her villainous antecedents; I thought of the old obscene harpy down in Lambeth; and my heart would take cold at the thought, insisting that she knew the truth, that she must know it, and that therein was confessed the real secret of her antipathy to me. Then, so much admitted, or assumed, was it not a consequent assumption that his secret knowledge of the fact that I was not Lady Skene’s child constituted Dalston’s hold over her? That would be to infer that he, at least, was cognisant of my true parentage. But would it be that she was? or, even more inexplicably, that he was practising upon her ignorance of the truth? But how _could_ she be ignorant--how _could_ she? The hypothesis appeared incredible, monstrous. One only clear fact seemed to detach itself from the inextricable tangle of things--that I was not my supposed mother’s son.