"I am going.
Unless," he added, with his coarse laugh, "you think it wouldn't look well for Mrs.Horncastle to have been sitting in the dark with--a stranger!" He paused as she contemptuously put down the candlestick and threw the unlit match into the grate.

"No, I've nothing more to tell.
He's a fancy-looking pup.

You'd take him for twenty-one, though he's only sixteen--clean-limbed and perfect--but for one thing"-- He stopped.
He met her quick look of interrogation, however, with a lowering silence that, nevertheless, changed again as he surveyed her erect figure by the faint light of the window with a sardonic smile.

"He favors you, I think, and in all but one thing, too." "And that ?" she queried coldly, as he seemed to hesitate.
"He ain't ashamed of ME," he returned, with a laugh.
The door closed behind him; she heard his heavy step descend the creaking stairs; he was gone.

She went to the window and threw it open, as if to get rid of the atmosphere charged with his presence,--a presence still so potent that she now knew that for the last five minutes she had been, to her horror, struggling against its magnetism.
She even recoiled now at the thought of her child, as if, in these new confidences over it, it had revived the old intimacy in this link of their common flesh.