“You thought—­I was dead?” The woman in the bed moved her haggard eyes towards him.

“Yes, lately I thought it.  I didn’t, for a long time.”

“I put that notice in—­so that—­you might marry again,” she said, slowly, and with difficulty.

“I suspected that.”

“But you—­didn’t marry.”

“How could I?—­when I had no real evidence?”

She closed her eyes, as though any attempt to argue, or explain was beyond her, and he had to wait while she gathered strength again.  After what seemed a long time, and in a rather stronger voice she said: 

“Did you ever find out—­what I had done?”

“I discovered that you had gone away with Rocca—­into Italy.  I followed you by motor, and got news of you as having gone over the Splugen.  My car had a bad accident on the pass, and I was ten weeks in hospital at Chur.  After that I lost all trace.”

“I heard of the accident,” she said, her eyes all the while searching out the changed details of a face which had once been familiar to her.  “But Rocca wasn’t with me then.  I had only old Zelie—­you remember?”

“The old bonne—­we had at Melun?”

She made a sign of assent.—­“I never lived with Rocca—­till after the child was born.”

“The child!  What do you mean?”

The words were a cry.  He hung over her, shaken and amazed.

“You never knew!”—­There was a faint, ghastly note of triumph in her voice.  “I wouldn’t tell you—­after that night we quarrelled—­I concealed it.  But he is your son—­sure enough.”

“My son!—­and he is alive?” Buntingford bent closer, trying to see her face.

She turned to look at him, nodding silently.

“Where is he?”

“In London.  It was about him—­I came down here.  I—­I—­want to get rid of him.”

A look of horror crossed his face, as though in her faint yet violent words he caught the echoes of an intolerable past.  But he controlled himself.

“Tell me more—­I want to help you.”

“You—­you won’t get any joy of him!” she said, still staring at him. 
“He’s not like other children—­he’s afflicted.  It was a bad doctor—­when
I was confined—­up in the hills near Lucca.  The child was injured. 
There’s nothing wrong with him—­but his brain.”

A flickering light in Buntingford’s face sank.

“And you want to get rid of him?”

“He’s so much trouble,” she said peevishly.  “I did the best I could for him.  Now I can’t afford to look after him.  I thought of everything I could do—­before—­”

“Before you thought of coming to me?”

She assented.  A long pause followed, during which Miss Alcott came in, administered stimulant, and whispered to Buntingford to let her rest a little.  He sat there beside her motionless, for half an hour or more, unconscious of the passage of time, his thoughts searching the past, and then again grappling dully with the extraordinary, the incredible statement that he possessed a son—­a living but, apparently, an idiot son.  The light began to fail, and Miss Alcott slipped in noiselessly again to light a small lamp out of sight of the patient.  “The doctor will soon be here,” she whispered to Buntingford.