She took her place at the head of the table. She was dressed, as he had been accustomed to see her, with neatness and taste; there was no change in her appearance in that respect, yet there was a change--a change which had struck George painfully yesterday, and which, in the midst of all the agitation of to-day, he could not keep from noticing.
"Are you well, Mrs. Routh?" he asked her, anxiously. "Are you sure you are well? I don't like your looks."
"Never mind my looks, George," Harriet said, cheerfully; "I am very well. Get on with your breakfast and your story. Routh will be here presently, and I want to know all about it before he comes. He gets impatient at my feminine curiosity, you know."
The smile with which she spoke was but the ghost of her former smile, and George still looked at her strangely, but he obeyed her, and proceeded with his breakfast and his story.
"I don't know very much about my mother's family," he said, "because they did not like her marriage with my father, and she kept aloof from them, and her parents were dead before she had the opportunity of appeasing them by making the fine match they would have considered her marriage with Mr. Carruthers to be. I know that some of their relatives were settled in America,--some at New York, some in South Carolina,--and my mother's brother, Mark Felton--queer name, puritanical and fanatical, with a touch of the association of assassination about it--was sent out to New York when quite a child. I forgot to tell you it was my mother's stepfather and her mother who objected to her first marriage--her own father died when she was an infant; and on her mother's second marriage with a Mr. Creswick--a poor, proud, dissipated fellow, I fancy, though I never heard much about him--the American branch of the family sent for the boy. My mother has told me they would have taken her too, and her stepfather would not have made the least objection--we haven't been lucky in stepfathers, Mrs. Routh--but her mother would not stand it; and so she kept her child. Not for many years, for she married my father when she was only seventeen. Her brother was just twenty then, and had been taken into the rich American firm of his relatives, and was a prosperous man. She knew very little of him, of course. I believe he took the same view of her marriage as her mother had taken; at all events, the first direct communication between them took place when my mother was left a handsome and poor young widow, with one boy, who did not make much delay about proving himself the graceless and ungrateful son you know him to have been."
George's voice faltered, and an expression of pain crossed his face. Harriet looked at him kindly, and laid her soft white hand on his.
"That is all over, you know," she said. "You will not err in that way again."
"But the consequences, Mrs. Routh, the consequences. Think of my mother now. However," and he drew a long breath, and threw his shoulders back, like a man who tries to shift a burden, "I must go on with my story. There's not much more to tell, however. My mother might have had a home for herself and me in her brother's house, but she could not bear dependence, and has told me often that she regarded unknown relatives as the most formidable kind of strangers. Her brother's wife made him resent my mother's determination to remain in England, and do the best she could for us both on our small means. Of course, all this was an old story long before I knew anything about it, and I fancy that it is only lately any correspondence has taken place between my mother and her brother. From this letter" (he touched the first he had read) "I can divine the nature of that correspondence. My mother," said George, sadly, "has appealed to her brother on behalf of her prodigal son, and her brother has told her his sorrows in return; they have been heavy, and in one respect not unlike her own. He, too, has an only son, and seems to find little happiness in the fact."
"Did you not know of your cousin's existence until now?" asked Harriet.
"O yes, I knew of it, in a kind of way; in fact, I just knew he existed, and no more. I don't think my mother knew more. I fancy in some previous letter he told her of his wife's death, and the general unsatisfactoriness of Arthur."