She raised her head now, and fixed her eyes on his, with a strange
insistence of observation. "Could they have been married?"

"The courts didn't think so."

"Could the courts have been mistaken?"

He started up again, and threw himself into another chair. "Good God, Kate!
We gave her every chance to prove her case--why didn't she do it? You don't
know what you're talking about--such things are kept from girls. Why,
whenever a man of Arthur's kind dies, such--such women turn up. There are
lawyers who live on such jobs--ask your father about it. Of course, this
woman expected to be bought off--"

"But if she wouldn't take your money?"

"She expected a big sum, I mean, to drop the case. When she found we meant
to fight it, she saw the game was up. I suppose it was her last throw, and
she was desperate; we don't know how many times she may have been through
the same thing before. That kind of woman is always trying to make money
out of the heirs of any man who--who has been about with them."

Kate received this in silence. She had a sense of walking along a narrow
ledge of consciousness above a sheer hallucinating depth into which she
dared not look. But the depth drew her, and she plunged one terrified
glance into it.

"But the child--the child was Arthur's?"