“Granny, don’t be angry! You know you’re frightened, and you know I care about you all. But you’re dreadfully high-minded. Isn’t there anything you can do?”
Mrs Brodrick suddenly collapsed.
“Nothing,” she said miserably. “How can any one move? It rests between him and Sylvia, and Sylvia, poor child, is absolutely—piteously content. She doesn’t see.”
“And never will!” thought Mrs Maxwell; “Heaven help us, for there must be some way out of this tangle, if one could only find it!” She said aloud, hesitatingly, “Could Teresa speak to her?”
“Could she?” Mrs Brodrick turned a pallid face, and Mrs Maxwell shook her head.
“True—impossible. Teresa must be kept out of it. Is there any hint that Sylvia would accept? Granny, you might try.”
“As if I hadn’t tried—twenty times!”
“And she won’t take it?”
“It isn’t that she won’t. She doesn’t realise that there can be anything I want to say.”
Mary Maxwell already felt better for having extracted a confidence which proved her to be in the right.