"Well, Rosalind, I will go, for you grow more mysterious every moment; only, remember that I should greatly like to know all the thoughts that come into that strange little head of yours. Will you promise that I shall?"
"No," was the ungracious reply; and turning away, she left the room by a door that led into a conservatory.
On entering his mother's dressing-room, Mowbray found her seated between her two daughters, and holding a hand of each.
She looked up as he entered: the traces of tears were on her cheeks, and her eyes rested on him with an expression of melancholy reproach such as he had never read in them before.
"My dear, dear mother!" he exclaimed as he approached her, "has my absence then vexed you so grievously?... I could not help it, mother; Sir Gilbert literally made me his prisoner."
"Sir Gilbert, Charles, might have shown more respect to the memory of the friend he has lost, than by keeping his son to listen to his own wild invectives against the wife that friend so loved and trusted."
"Whoever has repeated to you the hasty expressions of Sir Gilbert, my dear mother, in such a manner as to leave a painful impression on your mind against him, has not acted well. You know his temper, but you know his heart also; and I should not have thought that it could have been in the power of any one to make you doubt the real friendship of Sir Gilbert for us all."
"Surely, Charles, it was no symptom of friendship to me, to say that your dear father had made an accursed will!"
"Good heavens!... what a strange misrepresentation, mother!... and all hanging, as it should seem, upon one little syllable!... Our friend, as you well know, is what Rosalind calls a manish man; he denies the supremacy of woman, and might, and I verily believe did say, that a will which vested power in her must be a cursed will. But we know too well his long-licensed coarseness of expression to greatly marvel at that; but for the solemn and most awful word ac-cursed, believe me, mother, he never said it."
"It matters little, my dear son, what particular words of abuse Sir Gilbert uttered against me, provided that your heart did not echo them."