All that she had lost, still more all that she now had left, passed before her mind, and was weighed in the balance. She had no illusions now. Perhaps the bitterest drop was not so much the loss of Lucian, as the sense that he ought to have read her more truly. He himself had failed her. As for her mother, her eyes were as clear as Tory’s; and her heart, how hard and bitter! And the days had to go on. It was not only that she was not Lucian’s happy wife, she was Amethyst Haredale, with parents whom she despised, and a house in which no good thing could flourish; and yet, her aunt’s anxious entreaty to join her as soon as she would, had no attraction for her. Religion—goodness? Mrs Leigh and Lucian were good and religious, and had cruelly misjudged her. Were good people really much better than bad ones? She had thought herself religious; but she had got below all the religion that she had ever experienced, and with the distrust of all earthly love, came also distrust of the Divine love, from which she had scarcely distinguished it. Amethyst was one of those, to whom trouble comes, not only in vague and overwhelming feelings, but in keen sharp thoughts; and, young as she was, her thoughts hit life’s hard problems like well-aimed arrows.
“Well, Amethyst, do you think, now, there’s any good in being good?”
Una’s voice, with a hard ring through its weary languor, roused her with a start.
“Una! Why do you lie there in the sun? It’s very bad for you!” she said petulantly.
“Suppose it is, what does it matter? There’s nothing doing, and nothing worth living for, that I can see. You can’t say there is.”
“You ought not to say things like that, Una,” said Amethyst. “It is not right.”
“As if being right mattered!” said Una, and then with a sudden change the ready tears filled her eyes. “I am so—so miserable,” she sobbed, “and you are unkind to me now, Amethyst. The children tease me, and you don’t care for me now.”
Amethyst looked round at her. It was quite true. She had not cared. Even now she felt impatient of the trouble that was like a caricature of her own.
“It’s natural you should hate me, when I did all the mischief. But oh, I did try to make up for it—I did!”
“Nonsense!” said Amethyst. “I don’t hate you, but I don’t know that I can say anything to do you any good.”