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He had become aware that great dark circles had drawn themselves round her eyes, and that even her lips were colourless. She said, with a valiant effort: "I assure you, with thanks, that you have been most considerate, and that I am perfectly well. Are you at liberty to tell me, sir, the date of Captain Mildare's death?
"You must understand that the blackguard had given my wife details of Mildare's death at a farm owned by a friend of his in Natal, and that Hannah that my wife knew poor little Lucy Hawting had had a child by Mildare," Major Bingo spluttered. "That was why she asked Van Busch outright whether the girl with the nuns at Gueldersdorp was could be the same child, grown up? By the Living Tinker!
The ivory-pale, mutely-suffering face against the background of whitewashed wall flashed back upon his memory, in a circle of dazzling light. He saw her again, leaning against the door of the chapel as he told her the cruel news. He heard her saying: "Are you at liberty to tell me the date of Captain Mildare's death?
"Of course, the age of the unhappy girl whose death brought about the trial I speak of everything depends upon that. Mildare's daughter was a child of three years old when she lost father and mother. If alive to-day she would be nineteen years of age. I wish it had been my great good fortune to trace and find her. She should have had the opportunity of growing up to be a noble woman.
He recalled something that he had seen when the rearing horse had inclined perilously towards the footway that protecting maternal gesture, that swift interposition of the tall, active, black-robed figure between the white-clad, flower-faced, girlish creature and those threatening iron-shod hoofs.... "She loves the girl Dick Mildare's daughter by the treacherous friend who stole him from her.
Disguises of various kinds a suit of clothes lined with chamois-leather bags for gold-smugglin' a good deal of the raw stuff itself, scattered all over the shop by the blow-up and in a rusty cashbox a diary or private ledger, posted up in a clumsy kind of thieves' cipher, impossible to make out, but with the name written on it of the identical man my wife suspected and the Chief believed to be the murderer of Miss Mildare's adopted mother!
The hearer experienced a momentary feeling of relief and of anger relief to think that dead Dick Mildare's daughter should have found refuge in such a woman's heart; anger that the woman should have concealed from him the girl's identity, knowing her the object of his own anxious search. Then he understood. His anger died as suddenly as it had been kindled.
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