ldn't forget. The lynx-face, with the yellow eyes
and red hair like mine, haunted me. I began to dream of my child being
born like that--a girl, deformed in the horrid, mysterious way that you
could only feel. I could never go to sleep again on a night after the
dream. I suppose I looked pale; and he worried, and the doctors advised
the country. We had some friends who'd just come back from the Loire,
and they told us about a wonderful chateau there that was to be rented
furnished. It belonged to an old family named de la Tour, who had lost
their money. They had a romantic, tragic sort of history that interested
us, especially Jack, so we went to see the place. There were vineyards
badly cultivated, and a forest, and some shooting, too; and we took it
for a few months. But we hadn't been there many weeks when a telegram
came to Jack from Edwin Reeves. Edwin acted for him even then. It was
important, on account of some business, for Jack to go home. He would
have answered that it was impossible, but I said, why not go? I was
safe, and he could be back in a month or five weeks. I had old Anne
Wickham with me, and she'd been my nurse when I was a little girl, you
know, and my maid afterward, till she died. You can remember her."

Max could. As a very tiny boy he had been almost afraid of old Anne
Wickham, because his nurse was afraid of her: also because she had
glared at him critically, mercilessly, with her great eyes in dark
hollows, never smiling kindly, as other people did, but seeming to
search for some fault in him. Now, suddenly, he understood this gloomy
riddle of his childhood.

Rose Doran, beneath her veil, did not wait for any answer, or wish for
one. She hurried on, only stopping now and then to sigh out her
restlessness and pain, making Max bite his lip and quiver as if under
the lash.

"We had a Paris doctor engaged, and a trained nurse," she said. "They
were to come weeks before I expected my baby. I don't know how much Jack
was to pay for the doctor--thousands of dollars; and Jack thought to be
back in a month before, at latest. But one day I caught my foot going
downstairs, and fell. We had to send for the village doctor in a hurry,
and Anne had to remember all she knew about nursing. The child was a
seven months' baby--a girl. And she had a face like mine, and like
'Bella Donna,' and like a lynx. There was just that look of deformity I
had dreamed--mysterious and dreadful. I hated the creature. I could