Then she was out all last
night, wandering about, evidently in a state of great excitement. It was
as bad a fainting fit as I have ever seen."
"It would be impossible to move her?"
"For a day or two certainly. She keeps worrying about a boy--apparently
her own boy?"
"I will see to that."
Ramsay hesitated a moment and then said--"What are we to call her? It
will not be possible, I imagine, to keep her presence here altogether a
secret. She called herself, in talking to Miss Alcott, Madame Melegrani."
"Why not? As to explaining her, I hardly know what to say."
Buntingford put his hand across his eyes; the look of weariness, of
perplexity, intensified ten-fold.
"An acquaintance of yours in Italy, come to ask you for help?"
suggested Ramsay.
Buntingford withdrew his hand.
"No!" he said with decision. "Better tell the truth! She was my wife. She
left me, as she has told the Alcotts, and took steps eleven years ago to
make me believe her dead. And up to seven years ago, she passed as the
wife of a man whom I knew by the name of Sigismondo Rocca.
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