“It is only a flag of truce,” thought Madame as she drove homeward, “and after she is married to Archie, it will be war to the knife-hilt between us. I can feel that, and I would not fear it if I was sure of Archie. But alas, he is so changed! He is so changed!”
Marion’s thoughts were not more friendly, and she did not scruple to express them in words to her father. “That dreadful old woman was here this afternoon,” she said. “She tried to flatter me; she tried to make me believe she was glad I was going to marry Archie. What a consummate old hypocrite she is! I wonder if she thinks I will live in the same house with her?”
“Of course she thinks so.”
“I will not. Archie and I have agreed to marry next Christmas. She will move into her own house in time to hold her Christmas there.”
“I wouldn’t insist on that, Marion. She has lived at Braelands nearly all her life. The Dower House is but a wretched place after it. The street in which it stands has become not only poor, but busy, and the big garden that was round it when the home was settled on her was sold in Archie’s father’s time, bit by bit, for shops and a preserving factory. You cannot send her to the Dower House.”
“She cannot stay at Braelands. She charges the very air of any house she is in with hatred and quarrelling. Every one knows she has saved money; if she does not like the Dower House, she can go to Edinburgh, or London, or anywhere she likes—the further away from Braelands, the better.”
CHAPTER XIII. — THE “LITTLE SOPHY”
Madame did not go to the Dower House. Archie was opposed to such a humiliation of the proud woman, and a compromise was made by which she was to occupy the house in Edinburgh which had been the Braelands’s residence during a great part of every winter. It was a handsome dwelling, and Madame settled herself there in great splendour and comfort; but she was a wretched woman in spite of her surroundings. She had only unhappy memories of the past, she had no loving anticipations for the future. She knew that her son was likely to be ruled by the woman at his side, and she hoped nothing from Marion Glamis. The big Edinburgh house with its heavy dark furniture, its shadowy draperies, and its stately gloom, became a kind of death chamber in which she slowly went to decay, body and soul.