With her eyes blinded by stinging tears, and feeling very much more maddened by regret than by mortification, Leonetta fled to her room. She was not only staggered, she was also thoroughly ashamed. A boy suddenly butted by a lamb, which he had believed he might torment with impunity, could not have felt more astonished. A convert brought face to face with the livid wounds which, in her days of unbelief, she had inflicted upon a Christian martyr could not have felt more deeply dejected and penitent. Like a flash, an old emotion of childhood had filled her breast; an old emotion that seemed only to have gathered strength in the intervening years,—that blind, unthinking and dependent love of the infant for its mother.
Should she go back and throw herself at the wonderful woman's knees? Should she set out her plea for forgiveness in the folds of her mother's dress as she had done as a baby? No, Wilmott would be there,—Wilmott and everything besides! Moreover,—she looked in the glass,—her face was distraught, her ears flared, her eyes still smarted horribly. Even if Wilmott were dismissed as before, the girl would guess something.
Slowly she proceeded with her dressing, and, as she did so, a certain vague delicacy of feeling, a sort of secret reverence for her brave youth-loving mother downstairs, kept her from glancing too frequently in the glass. The contrast now, instead of elating her, simply accentuated her reminiscence of guilt. The very speed with which she adjusted her hair and made it "presentable," as her mother had expressed it, brought back the cruel memory of what had happened only a few minutes previously.
In being thus affected by Mrs. Delarayne's able and perfectly relentless handling of a difficult situation; in feeling her love for her mother intensified backwards, so to speak, to the degree it had attained in infancy, as the result of the incident, Leonetta showed not only that she was worthy of her incomparable mother, but also that she had survived less unimpaired, than some might have thought, the questionable blessings of a finishing education.
Mrs. Delarayne who, without being truculently triumphant, was nevertheless mildly conscious of having scored a valuable and highly desirable point, repaired to the drawing-room twenty minutes later in a mood admirably suited to giving her guests a warm and hearty welcome.
Cleopatra was the first to join her. Each woman honestly thought that she had rarely seen the other look quite so beautiful, and the comments that were exchanged were as sincere as they were flattering.
Mrs. Delarayne was too loyal to betray one sister to the other, so she did not refer to the incident in her bedroom. Occasionally, however, thoughts of it would make her glance a little anxiously in the direction of the door, and as she did so, she fervently hoped that the lesson she had administered to her younger daughter had not been too severe.
"I wonder what Baby can be doing all this time!" Cleopatra exclaimed at last.
"I'll go and see, I think," said Mrs. Delarayne, lifting her dress just slightly in front, and making towards the door.
"No, Edith," her daughter exclaimed, rising quickly. "I'll go. I cannot have you making yourself hot by climbing all those stairs. Please let me go!"