She writhed at the thought.
Her very ignorance of convent life added to the sense of horror which was gradually taking possession of her imagination.
She looked back upon the days when she and Frances and Hazel had been children together as at some incredible other life, full of a security so supreme that it had been undreamed of by any of them.
In vain Rosamund told herself, with a piteous attempt at readjusting her focus upon life, that change was only development, that alteration was bound to mark the inevitable way of progress.
“Not this way,” her anguish protested wildly. “Not this way. Hazel has cut herself off to a certain extent by her own voluntary act, but at least she is happy and free—and my Francie—how do I know her to be either?”
Only two things stood out saliently in the darkness which encompassed Rosamund’s soul: her resolution not to add to the cost of Frances’ sacrifice by any pleadings of her own, and her anguished trembling hope that Frances might yet relinquish that way which seemed so fraught with suffering for them both.
XXV
AT Pensevern, Mrs. Severing had received one of her son’s infrequent, and generally ill-timed, suggestions of a return to the parental roof.
“Will join you in London,” was Nina’s immediate telegraphic reply.
She did not definitely assure herself that she wished to preclude, as far as might be, the possibility of a rapprochement between her son and Rosamund Grantham, but situations in which Nina Severing did not play the principal rôle were ever distasteful to her, and she gracefully eluded the possibility of involving herself in such a situation by a murmured fear that Morris would find Pensevern and the depths of the country too uneventful.