When she finished, Jacqueline was on her feet, queerly white and still. "You knew," she whispered as if to herself, "and you let me think him—? You never told me—you let me suffer—Oh, Mother!—Why, it was deceit! It was a lie!"
Kate frowned. "What of it? Lying, deceit—what are they to me beside your happiness? I only wanted that—and thank God I've got it!"
Jacqueline gave her a strange look. "My happiness," she repeated.
The tone of her voice startled Kate. "You are happy?" she said, quickly, between a statement and a question. "You told me yourself that Philip was the dearest thing in the world to you!"
Jacqueline answered, "Mother, I love Philip now better than I ever dreamed it was possible to love any one. But—It does not make you exactly happy to feel that way about a man who—who doesn't know you're there, unless you remind him."
"Jacqueline! Philip does not love you—?"
"He tries his best to," said the girl with a hopeless little smile, "but he can't. Oh, it's quite true!"—she stopped her mother's protest by a gesture. "I knew it before I married him. Jemmy told me—Oh, do you think I would have done such a thing, do you dream I would have accepted such a sacrifice, if I had seen anything else to do? If I had guessed that Mr. Channing really wanted me?—I belonged to Mr. Channing, Mother.—Now do you see what you have done?"
Kate had risen, too, her hands shaking. A strange and appalling thought had forced itself into her head. She asked in a sort of whisper, "Daughter, why did you marry Philip?"
The answer came with a terrible simplicity, "Because I did not want to be like Mag Henderson. Because I thought—if a baby came—you never can tell—it would be better to have a father for it."
In the silence that followed, innumerable little familiar home-sounds came to Kate's ears; the crackling of a log in the fire, a negro voice out of doors calling "Soo-i, soo-i," to the pigs, Big Liza in the distant kitchen chanting a revival hymn while she washed the dishes. Her eyes in that one moment took in, as do the eyes of a drowning person, every detail of her surroundings; the sturdy masculine furniture covered incongruously with its wedding crétonne, the piano and books that had been a part of her childhood's home, her open office beyond, with its business-like array of maps and ledgers; and all these things seemed to accuse her of something, of being a traitor to some trust. Her eyes came to rest at last upon the old flintlock rifle over the mantel-shelf, beneath the wooden, grim-faced Kildare who had carried it.