Mrs. Bowerbank gave utterance to no commendation; she only put down her empty glass and wiped her large mouth with much thoroughness and judgement. Then she said, as if it were as cheerful an idea as, in the premises, she was capable of expressing: “Ah, well, there’ll be plenty later on to give him all information!” “I pray God he may live and die without knowing it!” Miss Pynsent cried with intensity. Her companion gazed at her with a kind of professional patience. “You don’t keep your ideas together. How can he go to her then, if he’s never to know?” “Oh, did you mean she’d tell him?” Miss Pynsent plaintively gasped. “Tell him! He won’t need to be told, once she gets hold of him and gives him—what she mentioned to me.” “What she mentioned—?” Miss Pynsent repeated, open-eyed. “The kiss her lips have been famished for all these years.” “Ah, poor desolate woman!” the little dressmaker murmured while her pity gushed up again. “Of course he’ll see she’s fond of him,” she pursued simply. Then she added with an inspiration more brilliant: “We might tell him she’s his aunt!” “You may tell him she’s his grandmother if you like. But it’s all in the family.” “Yes, on that side,” said Miss Pynsent musingly and irrepressibly. “And will she speak that fluent French?” she inquired as from a full mind. “In that case he won’t understand.” “Oh, a child will understand its own mother, whatever she speaks,” Mrs. Bowerbank returned, declining to administer a superficial comfort. But she subjoined, opening the door for escape from a prospect which bristled with dangers: “Of course it’s just according to your own idea. You needn’t bring the child at all unless you like. There’s many a one that wouldn’t. There’s no compulsion.” “And would nothing be done to me if I didn’t?” poor Miss Pynsent asked, unable to rid herself of the impression that it was somehow the arm of the law that was stretched out to touch her. “The only thing that could happen to you would be that _he_ might throw it up against you later,” the lady from the prison observed with a gloomy breadth of view. “Yes, indeed, if he were to know that I had kept him back.” “Oh, he’d be sure to know, one of these days. We see a great deal of that—the way things come out,” said Mrs. Bowerbank, whose outlook appeared to abound in cheerless contingencies. “You must remember that it’s her dying wish and that you may have it on your conscience.” “That’s a thing I _never_ could abide!” the little dressmaker exclaimed with great emphasis and a visible shiver; after which she picked up various scattered remnants of muslin and cut paper and began to roll them together with a desperate and mechanical haste. “It’s quite awful, to know what to do—if you’re very sure she _is_ dying.” “Do you mean she’s shamming? We’ve plenty of that—but we know how to treat ’em.”