Page:The Other House (London, William Heinemann, 1896), Volume 1.djvu/58

44 "To-day—and once before."

Tony looked simple in his wonder. "Yesterday?"

Rose hesitated again. "No; before your child was born. Soon after I came."

"She had made up her mind then from the first?"

"Yes," said Rose, with the serenity of superior sense; "she had laid out for herself that pleasant little prospect. She called it a presentiment, a fixed idea."

Tony took this in with a frown. "And you never spoke of it?"

"To you? Why in the world should I—when she herself didn't? I took it perfectly for what it was—an inevitable but unimportant result of the nervous depression produced by her stepmother's visit."

Tony had fidgeted away with his hands in the pockets of his trousers. "Damn her stepmother's visit!"

"That's exactly what I did!" Rose laughed.

"Damn her stepmother too!" the young man angrily pursued.