Sophy turned her pale, terrified little face up to her mother's. The worst had happened, and the truth came out.

"No, we—we hate you. You're cruel to us; we hate you, and we love papa."

Harriet's grip tightened on the child's arm. Sophy's very audacity kept her still for a moment. But at the next she lifted her higher in the air. Suzette sprang forward with a cry, and Garrett dashed into the room, shrieking, "Don't, don't, my lady!"

They were too late. The child was flung violently down; her head struck the iron fender; she rolled over and lay quite still, bleeding from the forehead. Suzette and Garrett caught Harriet Courtland by the arms. A low, frightened weeping came from the other two little girls.

Harriet stood for a moment in the grasp of the two women who sought to restrain her and would have thrown themselves upon her had she tried to move. But restraint was no more necessary. Sophy had ransomed her sisters, and lay so quiet, bleeding from the head. In a loud voice Harriet Courtland cried, "Have I killed her? Oh, my God!" and herself broke into a tempest of hysterical sobbing. She fell back into Garrett's arms, shuddering, weeping, now utterly collapsed. Suzette went and knelt by Sophy.

"No, she's not dead, but it's no fault of yours," she said.

Harriet wrenched free from Garrett and flung herself on her knees by the table, stretching her arms across it and beating her forehead on the wood. The two children looked at her, wondering and appalled.

CHAPTER XXI
AN UNCOMPROMISING EXPRESSION

On the morrow of her attempted flight and enforced return a leaden heaviness had clogged Sibylla's brain and limbs. Her body was quick to recover; her thoughts were for long drowsy and numb. She seemed to have died to an old life without finding a new one. Blake was to her as a dead friend; she would see and hear of him no more; she harboured no idea of meeting him again. The bonds between them were finally rent. This attitude towards him saved his character from criticism and his weakness from too close an examination, while it left her free to brood in the security of despair on all that she had thought to find in him and on the desolation his loss had made. The instinctive love for her child, which had asserted itself while her intellect was dormant, could not prevail against the sullen preoccupation of re-awaking thoughts, or, if it could penetrate into them, came no more fresh and pure, but tainted with the sorrow and the anger which circled round that innocent head. She was tender, but in pity, not in pride; she loved, but without joy. The shadows hung so dark about the child's cot. They hid from her eyes still the sin of her own desertion, and hindered the remorse which might best lead her back to love unalloyed. Still she arraigned not herself but only Grantley and the inevitable. Grantley was the inevitable; there stood the truth of it; she bowed her head to the knowledge, but did not incline her heart to the lesson it had to teach.

Yet the knowledge counted; she looked on Grantley with different eyes. The revelation of himself, wrung from him by overpowering necessity, did its work. The resolve he had then announced, presumptuous beyond the right of mortal man, less than human in its cruelty, almost more than human in its audacity of successful revolt against destiny, might leave him hateful still, but showed him not negligible. He could not be put on one side, discarded, eliminated from her life. He was too big for that. Against her will he attracted her attention and constrained her interest. The thought of what lay beneath his suave demeanour sometimes appalled, sometimes amused, and always fascinated her now. She saw that her old conception had erred; it had been too negative in character; what he could not do or be or give had seemed the whole of the matter to her. In the light of the revelation that was wrong. The positive—a very considerable positive—must be taken into account. The pride she had loathed was not a barren self-conceit, nor merely a sterile self-engrossment. It had issue in an assurance almost supernatural and a courage above morality. Sibylla's first relief came in the reflection that though she might have married a monster, at least she had not given herself to a stick or a stone; she was clear as to her preference when the choice was reduced to that alternative.