Yet, even as she spoke, her hand fell powerless by her side and commenced to shake and quiver once more, when, putting her other upon my arm, she bade me Good Night and blessed and kissed me and went to her room. I lay awake some time in my own bed thinking on what she had said, for well I knew what had prompted her to speak as she had done. I knew that, outside the evil and the wrongs that my uncle had testified to me, there was that other far greater wrong to her which no honest woman could bear; the base insinuations that Considine had uttered about his intimacy with her, insinuations partly made to gratify his own vanity, and partly, as I judged, to enable Robert St. Amande to cast doubt upon my birth. And I thought that, knowing as she did know, of these horrid villainies, it was not strange she should feel and speak so bitterly. These my musings, with some sounds of revellers passing by outside singing and hooting ribald songs--though one with a sweet voice sang the old song "Ianthe the Lovely," most bewitchingly--kept me awake, as I say, some time, but at last I slumbered in peace within my mother's shelter. Yet not without disturbance through the night either, for once on turning in my bed I heard her call to me to know if all was well, and once I heard her murmur, "The villains, oh! the villains," and still once more I heard her sob, "Oh! Gerald, Gerald, if thou would'st but have had it so!" by which I knew that she was thinking of my misguided father and not of me. In the morning as we sat at our breakfast of chocolate and bread--with, for me, another plate of the corned beef which, my mother told me, the landlady put up in great pickling tubs when the winter was approaching and, with her family, lived upon for many months, serving out to the lodgers who wished for them fair-sized platesful at two pence each--there came a demure gentleman who asked of Molly if the young lord had yet arrived, or if news had been heard of him. "It is the Marquis's gentleman," my mother whispered to me, "and, observe, dear one, he speaks of you as 'the young lord.'" Then, raising her voice a little, she bade Molly show him in as his lordship had arrived. When he had entered the room and made a profound obeisance to her and another to me, he said that, since I was now in London, he had orders to carry me to the Marquis in a coach which he had outside, for he was ready to receive me, being always in his library by eleven o'clock to grant interviews to those who had business With him. "We will attend his lordship," my mother said. "I presume, Mr. Horton, there can be no objection to my going too. And I feel well this morning; a sight of my child's dear face has benefited me much; I am quite capable of reaching the coach."