But even as she heard him she realised that it was the almost inevitable outcome--not only of what was at the moment happening to the threatened and threatening world, but of his singularly secretive past--of all the things he had hidden and also of all the things he had professed not to hide but had baffled people with.
"Since the morning Redcliff dropped his bomb I have not been able to think of much else," he said.

"It was a bomb, I own.

Neither you nor I had reason for a shadow of suspicion.

My mind has a trick of dragging back to me a memory of a village girl who was left as--as she is.

She said her lover had married her--but he went away and never came back.
The village she lived in was a few miles from Coombe Keep and she gave birth to a boy.