Careless idle words, spoken jestingly, but every one of which went home like a barbed arrow to the mother's heart. As she buried her face in the child's neck, she thought of her vow of eternal secrecy to her cousin. It had been extracted from her when under the influence of intense fear and horror. Her cousin had only forced a solemn promise from her with the intention of covering her own ignominy. It would have needed more than even the diabolical ingenuity of a Machiavel to have extorted from any mother her adhesion to a conspiracy for the ruin of her own child. But now she saw to her horror that each and every child she might bear to her own husband would, as a matter of course, be practically disinherited in favour of the little bastard. At that instant, there dawned on her for the first time the remote possible contingency of the child who was supposed to be Haggard's firstborn son ultimately inheriting the Pit Town title; that troubled her far less than do the probabilities of his ultimate succession to the Woolsack affect young Mr. Briefless when he is first called to the bar. But that each and every one of her children should by her own deliberate act, and for the benefit of an interloper, himself but a child of shame, be deprived of what was legitimately their own, their share of their father's heritage, did seem a very bitter cup. "I can tell you one thing, Georgie," said her husband; "your father's quite of my mind in the matter, and it is our universal respect for the law of primogeniture that has made England what she is. It's a sort of natural law of selection, and the survival of the fittest. The eldest son must be taken care of at the expense of the rest; he is the tribal chief, his brothers and sisters are but his henchmen and his slaves. Why, look at the French; since the Code Napoleon, which chopped up the land into little blocks and gave each child his share, there have been no great families in France. Money a young fellow can squander, but he cannot get rid of his ancestral acres, when they are tightly tied up to come to his eldest son. There's no way out of it, Georgie; the Warrenders and the Haggards wouldn't content themselves with turning in their graves, they'd haunt the pair of us, if we hesitated to do the regulation thing."