"I don't regret them!" Katharine said, as she went off to bed, laughing quietly.
But the next morning Clifford gave Tante an account of the meeting with Mrs Stanhope; and in the gentlest way possible Knutty confessed to him that she knew Alan had been suffering and grieving over certain vague ideas which Mrs Stanhope had planted in his mind when she saw him a day or two before they sailed for America. Knutty did not tell him what these ideas were; and he did not ask. But she described to him how Katharine and she had seen the boy coming down from the hills in the middle of the night, and how they had yearned to help him back to happiness and ease of spirit.
"Then you knew that Alan had been worked on by Mrs Stanhope, and yet you never gave a hint to me?" Clifford said.
"Ah," Knutty answered, "I had no heart to tell you. You were happy. It is such a long time since I have seen you happy. I had no heart to wound you."
"Alas!" said Clifford, "I have been thinking only of myself."
And he turned away from Knutty.
"It was not so at first," he said, as he turned to her again. "At first I thought only about my boy, whom I had hurt and alienated by my selfish outbreak just before his mother's death. I did all in my power to woo him again. I grieved over his growing indifference to me. I said in the bitterness of my heart, 'Marianne is between us.' On our travels I tried to forget and ignore it. But I longed to return; for there were no results of happiness to him or me from our journey and our close companionship. When we were on our way home, my heart grew suddenly lighter. And since that moment, I have been thinking only of myself—myself, Knutty. I have scarcely noticed that the boy did not want to be with me. I have not wanted to be with him. I have been forgetting him."
"But we have not been forgetting him, she and I," Knutty said gently. "Don't grieve. Every right-minded human being ought to have a spasm of self occasionally."
He smiled and stooped down to kiss her kind old hand.
"And you saw the little fellow wandering about in the silence of the night?" he asked sadly.