“It's the bookbinder!” she said to herself. “He has been telling her a pack of lies! His being in the house is part of the plot. It must be nipped in the bud! If it be no lie, if he be the very man, it must be nipped all the same! Good heavens! if Arthur should not marry her—or someone—before it is known!”
“It may be so,” she answered quietly, “but it hardly interests me. I don't like talking of such things to a girl, but innocence cannot always be spared in this wicked world. The child you speak of was born in this house, and stolen out of it; but his mother was a low woman; she was not the wife of sir Wilton.”
“Everybody believed her his wife!” faltered Barbara.
“Very possibly! Very likely! She may even have thought so herself! Such people are so ignorant!” said lady Ann with the utmost coolness. “He may even have married her after the child was born for anything I know.”
“Sir Wilton must have made her believe she was his wife!” cried Barbara, her blood rising at the thought of such a wrong done to Richard's mother.
“Possibly,” admitted lady Ann with a smile.
“Then a baronet may tell lies, though a gentleman may not!” said Barbara, as if speaking to herself.
Lady Ann was not indignant. She had hesitated to say a lady might lie, but did not hesitate to lie the moment the temptation came, nor for that would doubt herself a lady! She knew perfectly that the woman was the wife of her husband as much as she herself was, and that she died giving birth to the heir. She had no hope that any lie she could tell would keep that child out of the property if he were alive and her husband wished him to have it; but a lie well told to Barbara might help to keep her for Arthur.
“Gentlemen think they may tell lies to women!” she returned with calmness, and just a tinge of regret.
“How are they gentlemen then?” cried Barbara; “or where is the good of being a gentleman? Is it that he knows better how to lie to a woman? A knight used to be every woman's castle of refuge; a gentleman now, it seems, is a pitfall in the bush!”