“She had acutely felt the offence, the weakness, the dutifulness, whatever you may choose to call it, and in the rebound she married.”
“Who is she?” gasped Cecil.
“It is not fair to tell you,” was the gentle answer, with a shade of rebuke. “You need not look for her. She is not in the county.”
“I hope I shall never see her!”
“You need not dread doing so if you can only have fair play, and establish the power that belongs rightly to you. She would have no chance with you, even if he had forgiven her.”
“Has not he?”
“Never!”
“And he used up all his heart?” said Cecil in a low, musing tone.
“All but what his mother absorbed. She was a comparatively young and brilliant woman, and she knew her power. It is a great ascendancy, and only a man’s honest blindness could suppose that any woman would be content under it.”
Cecil’s tongue refused to utter what oppressed her heart—those evenings beside the sofa, those eager home expeditions for Sunday, the uniform maintenance of his mother’s supremacy.