IX.
She saw Catty open the front door and run away. Her mother was coming slowly down the narrow hall.
She ran up the flagged path.
"Mamma!" She flung herself to the embrace.
Her mother swerved from her, staggering back and putting out her hands between them. Aware of Mr. Parish shouldering the trunk, she turned into the open dining-room. Mary followed her and shut the door.
Her mother sat down, helplessly. Mary saw that she was crying; she had been crying a long time. Her soaked eyelashes were parted by her tears and gathered into points.
"Mamma—what is it?"
"What is it? You've disgraced yourself. Everlastingly. You've disgraced your father, and you've disgraced me. That's what it is."
"I haven't done anything of the sort, Mamma."
"You don't think it's a disgrace, then, to be expelled? For infidelity."
"But I'm not expelled."
"You are expelled. And you know it."
"No. They said I wasn't. They didn't want me to go. They told me you wanted me back again."
"Is it likely I should want you when you hadn't been gone three weeks?"
She could hear herself gasp, see herself standing there, open-mouthed, idiotic.
Nothing could shake her mother in her belief that she had been expelled.
"Of course, if it makes you happier to believe it," she said at last, "do. Will you let me see Miss Lambert's letter?"
"No," her mother said. "I will not."
Suddenly she felt hard and strong, grown-up in her sad wisdom. Her mother didn't love her. She never had loved her. Nothing she could ever do would make her love her. Miracles didn't happen.
She thought: "I wonder why she won't let me see Miss Lambert's letter?"
She went upstairs to her room. She leaned on the sill of the open window, looking out, drinking in the sweet air of the autumn fields. The five elms raised golden heads to a blue sky.
Her childhood had died with a little gasp.
Catty came in to unpack her box. Catty, with wet cheeks, kissed a dead child.