“_Your_ child!” he said with a quiet concentrated scorn that made each word seem a stab. “_My_ child, you mean. You long ago forfeited all right to call her yours. What! would you dare to stain her spotlessness with your guilt? Would you, with such a past as yours, dare to claim her for your daughter, and look to her to call you mother? Is it your wish that she should be told the story of your life? Or would you prefer to pose before her as the innocent victim of circumstances which you could not control? No, I will not believe you are quite so depraved as that. As you cannot but know, her way and yours lie wide apart. You did your utmost to rob me of her when she was a child, and now that I have found her she belongs to me alone.” As he went out and shut the door behind him, all the strength seemed to go out of Giovanna’s limbs. She sank to the floor and there crouched with clasped hands and bowed head. “He is right—he is right,” she moaned. “I am not fit to tie the latchets of her shoes.” CHAPTER XLVIII. SIR GILBERT’S GREAT SURPRISE On leaving his wife John Clare engaged a hansom and was driven direct to Gray’s Inn Square. His object was to find Kirby Griggs and hear again from his lips the story which had already been told him by Everard Lisle. The lawyer’s clerk was on the point of going out for his midday meal, so John secured him, and, taking him to a restaurant at which it was possible to engage a private room, he treated him to what Griggs later termed to his wife “a sumptuous repast,” and did not let him go till he had drawn from him every scrap of information which bore in any way on the facts he was bent on investigating. With the aid of the light which his wife’s narrative had thrown on the affair, the mystery which had heretofore enshrouded the proceedings and conduct of Martha Griggs was in a great measure dispelled. There could be no doubt that when her mistress was seized with fever and taken to the hospital, the temptation to decamp with the latter’s money and luggage had proved too potent for the woman’s ill-balanced mind. Having once crossed the narrow boundary which divides honesty from its opposite, it was characteristic of her flighty disposition, surcharged with feminine vanity, that she should masquerade in her mistress’s gowns and jewellery and pass herself off under a preposterous name culled from one of her favourite penny romances. What had been her intentions with regard to the disposal of the child after she should have reached England could not even be surmised. Her death, so sudden and unforeseen, had put an end to everything as far as she was concerned.