"Indeed!" Edwin exclaimed, very feebly. He knew not whether his voice
was natural or unnatural. He felt as if he had received a heavy blow
with a sandbag over the heart: not a symbolic, but a real physical blow.
He might, standing innocent in the street, have been staggeringly
assailed by a complete stranger of mild and harmless appearance, who had
then passed tranquilly on. Dizzy astonishment held him, to the
exclusion of any other sentiment. He might have gasped, foolish and
tottering: "Why--what's the meaning of this? What's happened?" He
looked at the child uncomprehendingly, idiotically. Little by little--
it seemed an age, and was in fact a few seconds--he resumed his
faculties, and remembered that in order to keep a conventional
self-respect he must behave in such a manner as to cause Janet to
believe that her revelation of the child's identity had in no way
disturbed him. To act a friendly indifference seemed to him, then, to
be the most important duty in life. And he knew not why.
"I thought," he said in a low voice, and then he began again, "I thought
you hadn't been seeing anything of her, of Mrs Cannon, for a long time
now."
The child was climbing on a chair at the window that gave on the garden,
absorbed in exploration and discovery, quite ignoring the adults.
Either Janet had forgotten him, or she had no hope of controlling him
and was trusting to chance that the young wild stag would do nothing too
dreadful.
"Well," she admitted, "we haven't." Her constraint recurred. Very
evidently she had to be careful about what she said. There were reasons
why even to Edwin she would not be frank. "I only brought him down from
London yesterday."