The first time she had heard Mrs. Lancing tell a lie—quite pleasantly, and without the slightest effort or hesitation—Caroline had winced; it had been such a trivial, such a petty untruth; but what had given it importance in Caroline's eyes, accentuating the unworthiness of the act, had been the fact that both the children had been present, and that Betty had laughed at her mother's cleverness as at an excellent joke.
To doubt the woman's anxious, deep-rooted love for her children was to doubt the light of the sun itself; but Caroline summed it up as a love without discrimination or any sense of real responsibility.
Camilla Lancing would have been aghast if any one had told her this; for there would be no sacrifice too great—of this the girl was convinced—for the mother to undertake on behalf of her children, if circumstances should demand it of her.
Caroline, however, was judging her by her everyday attitude, when life was running on ordinary and not heroic lines, and she drew her conclusions from those unconscious signs and uncounted actions that reveal the personality far more truthfully than any deliberate or analytical study can ever do.
Dennis, who was a garrulous person, was fond of dilating on her mistress's little ways; but she was loyal. It was soon made evident that she was very fond of Mrs. Lancing.
"She never had no proper chance," she said this night to Caroline as they made notes and agreed to buy only what was absolutely necessary. "Started out, she did, with everything that money can give. My sister was a second housemaid in her old home. That was before her father lost everything and they come down to next to nothing. Miss Camilla was only a bit of a child then, and if Sir Edmund had done the proper thing by her he would have let his sister take her. You see his wife died when Miss Camilla was born. But he wouldn't part with her—and so they went wandering about goodness knows where, never staying more nor a month in any place. How I came to know so much was because I took service with Sir Edmund's sister, Lady Settlewood, and a hard place I had with her too; a little bit different to what I get now! Her ladyship was for ever wantin' to have Miss Camilla to live with her, she'd no children of her own. She declared as it was a sin and a crime that the girl should grow up any-hows, with no chance of schooling; but there, she just talked to deaf ears! For if even the father would have given her up, Miss Camilla wouldn't have left him neither. There's a picture of Sir Edmund hanging beside Mrs. Lancing's bed," said Dennis. "You look at it when you go in her room next time, and you'll see what a nice face he had. Many's the time he's given me a sovereign when I know he'd none too many to spare!"
Caroline interposed here a little gently.
"Perhaps Mrs. Lancing would rather not have these things talked about, Dennis?"
But Dennis, who was folding up the clothes and putting them away, only shrugged her shoulders.
"She knows there'll be nothing told bad if it's told by me," she said; "besides," added the woman, "I'm telling you this because you're the first person as has come into this house as I'd care to see stay in, and that's the truth. My dear," said the maid, straightening herself for a minute, "she wants a friend awful badly. Some one different to me. There's things she could talk to you about which she couldn't talk to me. I'd like you to know, now you're starting out, just what she is, and why things seem to go so crookedly. How do you expect her to keep account of pennies when she was brought up in the way she was? I always 'oped her ladyship was going to stand by Miss Camilla, and so I think she would have done if only there hadn't been that miserable marriage!"