So on this day the troubles of Derval really began. He felt that he could never be even confident in the presence of this stranger who had so suddenly taken a high place in their little household. There was everything in her manner and bearing to repel him, and when she spoke to him his large eyes dilated under her stony gaze, as those of a bird are said to do when a serpent begins its charm of fear; and when rated for some trifle, he said sullenly:
"I want my own mamma. Why did papa bring you here, and set you in her place at table?"
"Dare you say so; you are a very bold child!" she exclaimed with some heat, and in her hard constrained voice, when a more generous woman would have smiled and resorted to caresses; "you ought to learn to love me."
"Never!" said the chubby Derval stoutly; "I shall only love my own mamma; she allowed me to climb on papa's knee and kiss him, but you won't."
"This brat, Derval," she thought, "must certainly remind him of that woman he loved, or fancied he loved, in the days of his youth and folly! Derval must be sent from this—out of this, somehow—anyhow! I would that he were old enough to go to sea."
To sea! Was his future shadowed forth in this idea?
Time will show.
And already she began to hate the child, all the more that her husband in his dreams—for he was as great a dreamer as ever—more than once, in her hearing, muttered or whispered to himself, softly and sadly, as to one near him, the name of "Mary," when doubtless the present was forgotten, and the days of the past came back in the visions of the night.
"He is thinking of his boyish fancies and his wax doll," Anne would mutter; "how shall I have patience to endure this if it occurs often?"
Tall, proud, haughty, and imperious in her secret nature, she was in all things the reverse of the mignonne, gentle and affectionate "wax doll," she thought of so contemptuously.