"Naturally, you must have done so. And I dare say those people with whom you lived. What was their name? Fox? Fawkes?" "The Fawcuses," said Mary. From the past the vision of Mrs. Fawcus came back to her like the page of a fairy tale. In all stories about illegitimate children, there was a woman like Mrs. Fawcus who looked after them, kept them hidden, and guarded their secret. Why had she not made another effort to read _Jane Eyre_ since it was taken away from her by Mademoiselle Lucinge only the week before she left school? In that book she might have pierced the dreadful mystery. "You may have guessed," Grandmamma was saying, "that your father married beneath him, married a very beautiful girl, the daughter of one of our own tenant farmers." "Then I'm not illegitimate!" Mary could not help exclaiming. "Good gracious me!" said Lady Flower crossly. "What minds modern young women have. Is no kind of decent veil to be left over the unpleasant side of life? Why, at your age I did not know the meaning of illegitimate." Mary would have liked to retort that she only knew the endless circle of a dictionary's definitions, that she did not really know its meaning. However, let her mother have been never so humble, she was married to her father. "But you cannot have guessed all the misery that your father's marriage brought in its train. It killed him: it killed your mother: it killed your mother's father: it might have killed you. Your father was dependent upon his father. He defied him, and what was the result?" Lady Flower left out nothing in the tale of the romantic marriage that could bring home to her granddaughter what it meant to run in the face of class tradition. "The situation is almost the same now as when I entreated your father twenty years ago to think what he was doing. But in this case it is worse, because in this case it is the man who is of lower station. Mary, I implore you to give up this good-looking but hopelessly ineligible young Frenchman." Lady Flower burst into tears, and Mary, who would have been less amazed to behold tears run down the cheeks of a marble statue, promised to give up Pierre. This was the letter she wrote: 23 King's Gate, W., _May 22, 1880._