Mrs. Clephane did not speak.
“Then I shall ask him—I shall ask him in your presence,” Anne exclaimed in a shaking voice.
At the sound of that break in her voice the dread of seeing her suffer once more superseded every other feeling in the mother’s breast. She leaned against the pillows, speechless for a moment; then she held out her hand, seeking Anne’s.
“There’s nothing to ask, dear; nothing to tell.”
“You don’t hate him, mother? You really don’t?”
Slowly Kate Clephane articulated: “I don’t—hate him.”
“But why won’t you see him with me, then? Why won’t you talk it all out with us once for all? Mother, what is it? I must know.”
Mrs. Clephane, under her daughter’s relentless eyes, felt the blood rising from her throat to her pale lips and drawn cheeks, and to the forehead in which her pulses must be visibly beating. She lay there, bathed in a self-accusing crimson, and it seemed to her that those clear young eyes were like steel blades plunging into the deepest folds of her conscience.
“You don’t hate him? But then you’re in love with him—you’re in love with him, and I’ve known it all along!” The girl shrilled it out suddenly, and hid her face in her hands.
Kate Clephane lay without speaking. In the first shock of the outcry all her defences had crashed together about her head, and it had been almost a relief to feel them going, to feel that pretences and disguises were at an end. Then Anne’s hands dropped to her side, and the mother, meeting her gaze, lost the sense of her own plight in the sight of that other woe. All at once she felt herself strong and resolute; all the old forces of dissimulation were pouring back through her veins. The accusing red faded from her face, and she lay there and quietly met the question in Anne’s eyes.