‘Did you speak?’ said Mrs. Doncastle, looking with astonishment at the butler.

‘Chickerel, what’s the matter—­are you ill?’ said Mr. Doncastle simultaneously.  ‘Was it you who said that?’

‘I did, sir,’ said Chickerel in a husky voice, scarcely above a whisper.  ‘I could not help it.’

‘Why?’

‘She is my daughter, and it shall be known at once!’

‘Who is your daughter?’

He paused a few moments nervously.  ‘Mrs. Petherwin,’ he said.

Upon this announcement Neigh looked at poor Chickerel as if he saw through him into the wall.  Mrs. Doncastle uttered a faint exclamation and leant back in her chair:  the bare possibility of the truth of Chickerel’s claims to such paternity shook her to pieces when she viewed her intimacies with Ethelberta during the past season—­the court she had paid her, the arrangements she had entered into to please her; above all, the dinner-party which she had contrived and carried out solely to gratify Lord Mountclere and bring him into personal communication with the general favourite; thus making herself probably the chief though unconscious instrument in promoting a match by which her butler was to become father-in-law to a peer she delighted to honour.  The crowd of perceptions almost took away her life; she closed her eyes in a white shiver.

’Do you mean to say that the lady who sat here at dinner at the same time that Lord Mountclere was present, is your daughter?’ asked Doncastle.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Chickerel respectfully.

‘How did she come to be your daughter?’

‘I—­ Well, she is my daughter, sir.’

‘Did you educate her?’

’Not altogether, sir.  She was a very clever child.  Lady Petherwin took a deal of trouble about her education.  They were both left widows about the same time:  the son died, then the father.  My daughter was only seventeen then.  But though she’s older now, her marriage with Lord Mountclere means misery.  He ought to marry another woman.’

‘It is very extraordinary,’ Mr. Doncastle murmured.  ’If you are ill you had better go and rest yourself, Chickerel.  Send in Thomas.’

Chickerel, who seemed to be much disturbed, then very gladly left the room, and dinner proceeded.  But such was the peculiarity of the case, that, though there was in it neither murder, robbery, illness, accident, fire, or any other of the tragic and legitimate shakers of human nerves, two of the three who were gathered there sat through the meal without the least consciousness of what viands had composed it.  Impressiveness depends as much upon propinquity as upon magnitude; and to have honoured unawares the daughter of the vilest Antipodean miscreant and murderer would have been less discomfiting to Mrs. Doncastle than it was to make the same blunder with the daughter of a respectable servant who happened to live in her own house.  To Neigh the announcement was as the catastrophe of a story already begun, rather than as an isolated wonder.  Ethelberta’s words had prepared him for something, though the nature of that thing was unknown.